NGLAN 




AND THE WAR 



i;t;»HHiimn!tHiiUSiHs;i.%; 



BY WALTER RAl 



< i . i 




Book .RS 



Eagland and the War 



OXFOED UNIVEKSITY PEESS 

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 

PUBLISHEE TO THE UNm:RSITY 



2168 



England and the War 

being 
SUNDRY ADDRESSES 

delivered during the war 
and now first collected 
by 
WALTER RALEIGH 



OXFORD 

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 

1918 



^ 



A 



6 



PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 



h 



PAGE 

7 
17 



31 



CONTENTS 

Preface . . 

Might is Right ...... 

First published as one of the Oxford Pamphlets 
October 1914. 

The War of Ideas 

An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute ^ 
December 12, 1916. 

The Faith of England 53 

An Address to the Union Society of University 
College, London, March 22, 1917. 

Some Gains of the War .... 75 
An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, 
February 13, 1918. 

The War and the Press .... 105 

A Paper read to the Essay Society, Eton College, 
March 14, 1918. 

Shakespeare and England . . . .130 

The Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British 
Academy, delivered July 4, 1918. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/englandwarbeings01rale 



PREFACE 

This book was not planned, but grew out of the 
troubles of the time. When, on one occasion or 
another, I was invited to lecture, I did not find, with 
Milton's Satan, that the mind is its own place; I 
could speak only of what I was thinking of, and 
my mind was fixed on the War. I am unacquainted 
with military science, so my treatment of the War 
was limited to an estimate of the characters of the 
antagonists. 

The character of Germany and the Germans is 
a riddle. I have seen no convincing solution of it 
by any Englishman, and hardly any confident attempt 
at a solution which did not .speak the uncontrolled 
language of passion. There is the same difficulty 
with the lower animals; our description of them 
tends to be a description of nothing but our own 
loves and hates. Who has ever fathomed the mind 
of a rhinoceros ; or has remembered, while he faces 
the beast; that a good rhinoceros is a pleasant member 
of the community in which his life is passed 1 We 
see only the folded hide, the horn, and the angry 
little eye. We know that he is strong and cunning, 
and that his desires and instincts are inconsistent 
with our welfare. Yet a rhinoceros is a simpler 
creature than a German, and does not trouble our 



8 ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

thought by conforming, on occasion, to civilized 
standards and humane conditions. 

It seems unreasonable to lay great stress on racial 
differences. The insuperable barrier that divides 
England from Germany has grown out of circum- 
stance and habit and thought. For many hundreds 
of years the German peoples have stood to arms in 
their own defence against the encroachments of suc- 
cessive empires ; and modern Germany learned the 
doctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged 
suffering at the hands of the greatest master of that 
immoral school — the Emperor Napoleon. No German 
can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage 
which the English mind quite naturally assumes 
when it is brought into contact with foreigners. 
The best example of this superiority of attitude is 
to be seen in the people who are called pacifists. 
They are a peculiarly English type, and they are 
the most arrogant of all the English. The idea that 
they should ever have to fight for their lives is to 
them supremely absurd. There must be some mis- 
take, they think, which can be easily remedied once 
it is pointed out. Their title to existence is so clear 
to themselves that they are convinced it will be 
universally recognized ; it must not be made a matter 
of international conflict. Partly, no doubt^ this belief 
is fostered by lack of imagination. The sheltered 
conditions and leisured life which they enjoy as the 
parasites of a dominant race have produced in them 
a false sense of security. But there is something 
also of the English strength and obstinacy of character 
in their self-confidence, and if ever Germany were to 



PREFACE 9 

conquer England some of them would spring to their 
full stature as the heroes of an age-long and indomi- 
table resistance. They are not held in much esteem 
to-day among their own people ; they are useless 
for the work in hand ; and their credit has suffered 
from the multitude of pretenders who make principle 
a cover for cowardice. But for all that, they are kin 
to the makers of England, and the fact that Germany 
would never tolerate them for an instant is not with- 
out its lesson. 

We shall never understand the Germans. Some of 
their traits may possibly be explained by their history. 
Their passionate devotion to the State, their amazing 
vulgarity, their worship of mechanism and mechanical 
efficiency, are explicable in a people who are not 
strong in individual character, who have suffered 
much to achieve union, and who have achieved it by 
subordinating themselves, soul and body, to a brutal 
taskmaster. But the convulsions of war have thrown 
up things that are deeper than these, primaeval 
things, which, until recently, civilization was be- 
lieved to have destroyed. The old monstrous gods 
who gave their names to the days of the week are 
alive again in Germany. The English soldier of to- 
day goes into action with the cold courage of a man 
who is prepared to make the best of a bad job. The 
German soldier sacrifices himself, in a frenzy of re- 
ligious exaltation, to the War-God. The filthiness 
that the Germans use, their deliberate befouling of 
all that is elegant and gracious and antique, their 
spitting into the food that is to be eaten by their 
prisoners, their defiling with ordure the sacred vessels 



10 ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

in the churches — all these things, too numerous and too 
monotonous to describe, are not the instinctive coarse- 
nesses of the brute beast; they are a solemn ritual 
of filth, religiously practised, by officers no less than 
by men. The waves of emotional exaltation which 
from time to time pass over the whole people have 
the same character, the character of savage religion. 

If they are alien to civilization when they fight, 
they are doubly alien when they reason. They are 
glib and fluent in the use of the terms which have 
been devised for the needs of thought and argument, 
but their use of these terms is empty, and exhibits 
all the intellectual processes with the intelligence 
left out. I know nothing more distressing than the 
attempt to follow any German argument concerning 
the War. If it were merely wrong-headed, cunning, 
deceitful, there might still be some compensation in 
its cleverness. There is no such compensation. The 
statements made are not false, but empty ; the argu- 
ments used are not bad, but meaningless. It is as 
if they despised language, and made use of it only 
because they believe that it is an instrument of 
deceit. But a man who has no respect for language 
cannot possibly use it in such a manner as to deceive 
others, especially if those others are accustomed to 
handle it delicately and powerfully. It ought surely 
to be easy to apologize for a war that commands the 
whole-hearted support of a nation ; but no a.pology 
worthy of the name has been produced in Germany. 
The pleadings which have been used are servile things, 
written to order, and directed to some particular 
address, as if the truth were of no importance. No 



PREFACE 11 

one of these appeals has produced any appreciable 
effect on the minds of educated Frenchmen, or English- 
men, or Americans, even among those who are eager 
to hear all that the enemy has to say for himself. 
This is a strange thing; and is perhaps the widest 
breach of all. We are hopelessly separated from the 
Germans ; we have lost the use of a common language, 
and cannot talk with them if we would. 

We cannot understand them ; is it remotely possible 
that they will ever understand us? Here, too, the 
difficulties seem insuperable. It is true that in the 
past they have shown themselves willing to study 
us and to imitate us. But unless they change their 
minds and their habits, it is not easy to see how they 
are to get near enough to us to carry on their study. 
While they remain what they are we do not want 
them in our neighbourhood. We are not fighting to 
anglicize Germany, or to impose ourselves on the 
Germans; our work is being done, as work is so 
often done in this idle sport-loving country, with 
a view to a holiday. We wish to forget the Germans ; 
and when once we have policed them into quiet and 
decency we shall have earned the right to forget 
them, at least for a time. The time of our respite 
perhaps will not be long. If the Allies defeat them, 
as the Allies will, it seems as certain as any uncertain 
thing can be that a mania for imitating British and 
American civilization will take possession of Germany. 
We are not vindictive to a beaten enemy, and when 
the Germans offer themselves as pupils we are not 
likely to be either enthusiastic in our welcome or 
obstinate in our refusal. We shall be bored Init 



12 ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

concessive. I confess that there are some things 
in the prospect of this imitation which haunt me 
like a nightmare. The British soldier, whom the 
German knows to be second to none, is distinguished 
for the levity and jocularity of his bearing in the 
face of danger. What will happen when the German 
soldier attempts to imitate that? We shall be de- 
livered from the German peril as when Israel came 
out of Egypt, and the mountains skipped like rams. 

The only parts of this book for which I claim any 
measure of authority are the parts which describe 
the English character. No one of purely English 
descent has ever been known to describe the English 
character, or to attempt to describe it. The English 
newspapers are full of praises of almost any of the 
allied troops other than the English regiments. I 
have more Scottish and Irish blood in my veins than 
Enoflish ; and I think I can see the Eno^lish character 
truly, from a little distance. If, by some fantastic 
chance, the statesmen of Germany could learn what 
I tell them, it would save their country from a vast 
loss of life and from many hopeless misadventures. 
The English character is not a removable part of the 
British Empire; it is the foundation of the whole 
structure, and the secret strength of the American 
Republic. But the statesmen of Germany, who fall 
easy victims to anj^thing foolish in the shape of a 
theory that flatters their vanity, would not believe 
a word of my essays even if they were to read them, 
so they must learn to know the English character in 
the usual way, as King George the Third learned to 
know it from Englishmen resident in America. 



PREFACE 13 

A habit of lying and a belief in the utility of 
lying are often attended by the most unhappy and 
paralysing effects. The liars become unable to recog- 
nize the truth when it is presented to them. This 
is the misery which fate has fixed on the German 
cause. War, the Germans are fond of remarking, is 
war. In almost all wars there is somethino- to be 
said on both sides of the question. To know that 
one side or the other is right may be difficult ; but it 
is always useful to know why your enemies are 
fighting. We know why Germany is fighting ; she 
explained it very fully, by her most authoritative 
voices, on the very eve of the struggle, and she has 
repeated it many times since in moments of confidence 
or inadvertence. But here is the tragedy of Germany : 
she does not know why we are fighting. We have 
told her often enough, but she does not believe it, 
and treats our statement as an exercise in the cunning- 
use of what she calls ethical propaganda. Why ethics, 
or morals, should be good enougli to inspire sympathy, 
but not good enough to inspire war, is one of the 
mysteries of German thought. No German, not even 
any of those few feeble German writers who have 
fitfully criticized the German plan, has any conception 
of the deep, sincere, unselfish, and righteous anger 
that was aroused in millions of hearts by the cruelties 
of the cowardly assault on Serbia and on Belgium. 
The late German Chancellor became uneasily aware 
that the crucifixion of Belgium was one of the causes 
which made this war a truceless war, and his 
offer, which no doubt seemed to him perfectly reason- 
able, was that Germany is willing to bargain about 



14 ENGLAND AND THE WAR 

Belgium, and to relax her hold, in exchange for solid 
advantages elsewhere. Perhaps he knew that if the 
Allies were to spend five minutes in bargaining about 
Belgium they would thereby condone the German 
crime and would lose all that they have fought for. 
But it seems more likely that he did not know it. 
The Allies know it. 

There is hope in these clear-cut issues. Of all 
wars that ever were fought this war is least likely 
to have an indecisive ending. It must be settled one 
way or the other. If the Allied Governments were 
to make peace to-day, there would be no peace ; the 
peoples of the free countries would not suffer it. 
Germany cannot make peace, for she is bound by 
heavy promises to her people, and she cannot deliver 
the goods. She is tied to the stake, and must fight 
the course. Emaciated, exhausted, repeating, as if 
in a bad dream, the old boastful appeals to military 
glory, she must go on till she drops, and then at last 
there will be peace. 

These may themselves seem boastful words ; they 
cannot be proved except by the event. There are 
some few Englishmen, with no stomach for a fight, 
who think that England is in a bad way because 
she is engaged in a war of which the end is not 
demonstrably certain. If the issues of wars were 
known beforehand, and could be discounted, there 
would be no wars. Good wars are fought by nations 
who make their choice, and would rather die than 
lose what they are fighting for. Military fortunes 
are notoriously variable, and depend on a hundred 
accidents. Moral causes are constant, and operate 



I 
PREFACE 15 

all the time. The chief of these moral causes is the 
character of a people. Germany, by her vaunted 
study of the art and science of war, has got herself 
into a position where no success can come to her 
except by way of the collapse or failure of the 
English-speaking peoples. A study of the moral 
causes, if she were capable of making it, w^ould not 
encourage her in her old impious belief that God will 
destroy these peoples in order to clear the way for 
the dominion of the Hohenzollerns. 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 

First published as one of the Oxford PamjMets, 
October 1914 

It is now recognized in England that our enemy in 
this war is not a tyrant military caste, but the united 
people of modern Germany. We have to combat an 
armed doctrine which is virtually the creed of all 
Germany. Saxony and Bavaria, it is true, would 
never have invented the doctrine; but they have 
accepted it from Prussia, and they believe it. The 
Prussian doctrine has paid the German people hand- 
somely ; it has given them their place in the world. 
When it ceases to pay them, and not till then, they 
will reconsider it. They will not think, till they are 
compelled to think. When they find themselves face 
to face with a greater and more enduring strength than 
their own, they will renounce their idol. But they 
are a brave people, a faithful people, and a stupid 
people, so that they will need rough proofs. They 
cannot be driven from their position by a little paper 
shot. In their present mood, if they hear an appeal 
to pity, sensibility, and sympathy, they take it for 
a cry of weakness. I am reminded of what I once 
heard said by a genial and humane Irish officer con- 
cerning a proposal to treat with the leaders of a Zulu 
rebellion. ' Kill them all,' he said, ' it 's the onl}^ 

2168 B 



18 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

thing they understand.' He meant that the Zulu 
chiefs would mistake moderation for a sign of fear. 
By the irony of human history this sentence has 
become almost true of the great German people, who 
built up the structure of modern metaphysics. They 
can be argued with only by those who have the will 
and the power to punish them. 

The doctrine that Might is Right, though it is true, 
is an unprofitable doctrine, for it is true only in so 
broad and simple a sense that no one would dream of 
denying it. If a single nation can conquer, depress, 
and destroy all the other nations of the earth and 
acquire for itself a sole domiuion, there may be matter 
for question whether God approves that dominion; 
what is certain is that He permits it. No earthly 
governor who is conscious of his power will waste 
time in listening to arguments concerning what his 
power ought to be. His right to wield the sword can 
be challenged only by the sv/ord. An all-powerful 
governor who feared no assault would never trouble 
himself to assert that Might is Right. He would 
smile and sit still. The doctrine, when it is pro- 
pounded by weak humanity, is never a statement of 
abstract truth ; it is a declaration of intention, a threat, 
a boast, an advertisement. It has no value except 
when there is some one to be frightened. But it is 
a very dangerous doctrine when it becomes the creed 
of a stupid people, for it flatters their self-sufficiency, 
and distracts their attention from the difficult, subtle, 
frail, and wavering conditions of human power. The 
tragic question for Germany to-day is what she can 
do, not whether it is right for her to do it. The 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 19 

buffaloes, it must be allowed, had a perfect right to 
dominate the prairie of America, till the hunters came. 
They moved in herds, they practised shock-tactics, 
they were violent, and very cunning. There are but 
few of them now. A nation of men who mistake 
violence for strength, and cunning for wisdom, may 
conceivably suffer the fate of the buffaloes^ and perish 
without knowing why. 

To the English mind the German political doctrine 
is so incredibly stupid that for many long years, while 
men in high authority in the German Empire, ministers, 
generals, and professors, expounded that doctrine at 
great length and with perfect clearness, hardly any one 
could be found in England to take it seriously, or to 
regard it as anything but the vapourings of a crazy 
sect. England knows better now ; the scream of the 
guns has awakened her. The German doctrine is to 
be put to the proof. Who dares to say what the result 
will be ? To predict certain failure to the German 
arms is only a kind of boasting. Yet there are guarded 
beliefs which a modest man is free to hold till they 
are seen to be groundless. The Germans have taken 
Antwerp ; they may possibly destroy the British fleet, 
overrun England and France, repel Russia, establish 
themselves as the dictators of Europe — in short, fulfil 
their dreams. What then? At an immense cost of 
human suffering they will have achieved, as it seems 
to us, a colossal and agonizing failure. Their engines 
of destruction will never serve them to create anything 
so fair as the civilization of France. Their uneasy 
jealousy and self-assertion is a miserable substitute 
for the old laws of chivalry and rco^ard for the weak, 

b2 



20 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

which they have renounced and forgotten. The will 
and high permission of all-ruling Heaven may leave 
them at large for a time, to seek evil to others. When 
they have finished with it, the world will have to be 
remade. 

We cannot be sure that the Ruler of the world will 
forbid this. We cannot even be sure that the destroj^ers, 
in the peace that their destruction will procure for 
them, may not themselves learn to rebuild. The Goths, 
who destroyed the fabric of the Roman Empire, gave 
their name, in time, to the greatest mediaeval art. 
Nature, it is well known, loves the strong, and gives 
to them, and to them alone, the chance of becoming 
civilized. Are the German people strong enough to 
earn that chance ? That is what we are to see. They 
have some admirable elements of strength, above any 
other European people. No other European army can 
be marched, in close order, regiment after regiment, 
up the slope of a glacis, under the fire of machine guns, 
without flinching, to certain death. This corporate 
courage and corporate discipline is so great and im- 
pressive a thing that it may well contain a promise 
for the future. Moreover, they are, within the circle 
of their own kin, affectionate and dutiful beyond the 
average of human society. If they succeed in their 
worldly ambitions, it will be a triumph of plain brute 
morality over all the subtler movements of the mind 
and heart. 

On the other hand, it is true to say that history 
shows no precedent for the attainment of world-wide 
power by a people so politically stupid as the German 
people are to-day. There is no mistake about this; 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 21 

the instances of German stupidity are so numerous 
that they make something like a complete history of 
German international relations. Here is one. Any 
time during the last twenty years it has been matter 
of common knowledge in England that one event, and 
one only, would make it impossible for England to 
remain a spectator in a European war— that event 
being the violation of the neutrality of Holland or 
Belgium. There was never any secret about this, it 
was quite well known to many people who took no 
special interest in foreign politics. Germany has 
maintained in this country, for many years, an army 
of spies and secret agents ; yet not one of them 
informed her of this important truth. Perhaps the 
radical difference between the German and the Eno-lish 
political systems blinded the astute agents. In England 
nothing really important is a secret, and the amount 
of privileged political information to be gleaned in 
barbers' shops, even when they are patronized by Civil 
servants, is distressingly small. Two hours of sympa- 
thetic conversation with an ordinary Englishman would 
have told the German Chancellor more about Enejlish 
politics than ever he heard in his life. For some reason 
or other he was unable to make use of this source of 
intelligence, so that he remained in complete ignorance 
of what every one in England knew and said. 

Here is another instance. The progrannne of German 
ambition has been voluminously published for the 
benefit of the world. France was first to be crushed ; 
then Russia ; then, by means of the indemnities pro- 
cured from these conquests, after some years of 
recuperation and effort, the naval power of England 



22 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

was to be challenged and destroyed. This programme 
was set forth by high authorities, and was generally 
accepted ; there was no criticism, and no demur. The 
crime against the civilization of the world foreshadowed 
in the horrible words ' France is to be crushed ' is before 
a high tribunal ; it would be idle to condemn it here. 
What happened is this. The French and Russian part 
of the programme was put into action last July. 
England, who had been told that her turn was not 
yet, that Germany would be ready for her in a matter 
of five or ten years, very naturally refused to wait 
her turn. She crowded up on to the scaffold, which 
even now is in peril of breaking down under the 
weight of its victims, and of burying the executioner 
in its ruins. But because England would not wait 
her turn, she is overwhelmed with accusations of 
treachery and inhumanity by a sincerely indignant 
Germany. Could stupidity, the stupidity of the wise 
men of Gotham, be more fantastic or more monstrous 1 
German stupidity was even more monstrous. A part 
of the accusation against England is that she has raised 
her hand against the nation nearest to her in blood. 
The alleged close kinship of England and Germany is 
based on bad history and doubtful theory. The English 
are a mixed race, with enormous infusions of Celtic and 
Roman blood. The Roman sculpture gallery at Naples 
is full of English faces. If the German agents would 
turn their attention to hatters' shops, and give the 
barbers a rest, they would find that no English hat 
fits any German head. But suppose we were cousins, 
or brothers even, what kind of argument is that on 
the lips of those who but a short time before were 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 23 

explaining, with a good deal of zest and with absolute 
frankness, how they intended to compass our ruin? 
There is something almost amiable in fatuity like 
this. A touch of the fool softens the brute. 

The Germans have a magnificent war-machine which 
rolls on its way, crushing all that it touches. We shall 
break it if we can. If we fail, the German nation is 
at the beginning, not the end, of its troubles. With 
the making of peace, even an armed peace, the war- 
machine has served its turn ; some other instrument 
of government must then be invented. There is no 
trace of a design for this new instrument in any of 
the German shops. The governors of Alsace-Lorraine 
otter no suggestions. The bald fact is that there is no 
spot in the world where the Germans govern another 
race and are not hated. They know this, and are 
disquieted ; they meet with coldness on all hands, and 
their remedy for the coldness is self-assertion and brag. 
The Russian statesman was right who remarked that 
modern Germany has been too early admitted into the 
comity of European nations. Her behaviour, in her 
new international relations, is like the behaviour of 
an uneasy, jealous upstart in an old-fashioned quiet 
drawing-room. She has no genius for equality ; her 
manners are a compound of threatening and flattery. 
When she wishes to assert herself, she bullies ; when 
she wishes to endear herself, she crawls ; and the one 
device is no more successful than the other. 

Might is Right ; but the sort of might which enables 
one nation to govern another in time of peace is very 
unlike tlie armoured thrust of the war-engine. It is 
a power compounded of sympathy and justice. Tlie 



24 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

English (it is admitted by many foreign critics) have 
studied justice and desired justice. They have inquired 
into and protected rights that were unfamiliar, and even 
grotesque, to their own ideas, because they believed 
them to be rights. In the matter of sympathy their 
reputation does not stand so high ; they are chill in 
manner, and dislike all effusive demonstrations of 
feeling. Yet those who come to know them know 
that they are not unimaginative ; they have a genius 
for equality ; and they do try to put themselves in 
the other fellow's place, to see how the position looks 
from that side. What has happened in India may 
perhaps be taken to prove, among many other things, 
that the inhabitants of India begin to know that 
England has done her best, and does feel a disinter- 
ested solicitude for the peoples under her charge. 
She has long been a mother of nations, and is not 
frightened by the problems of adolescence. 

The Germans have as yet shown no sign of skill in 
governing other peoples. Might is Riglit ; and it is 
quite conceivable that they may acquire colonies by 
violence. If they want to keep them they will have to 
shut their own professors' books, and study the intimate 
history of the British Empire. We are old hands at 
the business; we have lost more colonies than ever they 
owned, and we begin to think that we have learnt the 
secret of success. At any rate, our experience has done 
much for us, and has helped us to avoid failure. Yet 
the German colonial party stare at us with bovine male- 
volence. In all the library of German theorizing you 
will look in vain for any explanation of the fact that 
the Boers are, in the main, loyal to the British Empire. 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 25 

If German political thinkers could understand that 
political situation, which seems to English minds so 
simple, there might yet be hope for them. But they 
regard it all as a piece of black magic, and refuse to 
reason about it. How should a herd of cattle be driven 
without goads ? Witchcraft, witchcraft ! 

Their world-wide experience it is, perhaps, which has 
made the English quick to appreciate the virtues of 
other peoples. I have never known an Englishman 
who travelled in Russia without falling in love with the 
Russian people. I have never heard a German speak 
of the Russian people without contempt and dislike. 
Indeed the Germans are so unable to see any charm in 
that profound and humane people that they believe that 
the English liking for them must be an insincere pre- 
tence, put forward for wicked or selhsh reasons. What 
would they say if they saw a sight that is common in 
Indian towns, a British soldier and a Gurkha arm in 
arm, rolling down the street in cheerful brotherhood 1 
And how is it that it has never occurred to any of them 
that this sort of brotherhood has its value in Empire- 
building? The new German political doctrine has bidden 
farewell to Christianity, but there are some political 
advantages in Christianity which should not be over- 
looked. It teaches human beings to think of one another 
and to care for one another. It is an antidote to the 
worst and most poisonous kind of political stupidity. 

Another thing that the Germans will have to learn 
for the welfare of their much- talked Empire is the value 
of the lone man. The architects and builders of the 
British Empire were all lone men. Might is Right : 
but when a young Englishman is set down at an 



26 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

outpost of Empire to govern a warlike tribe, he has 
to do a good deal of hard thinking on the problem 
of political power and its foundations. He has to 
trust to himself, to form his ow^n conclusions, and to 
choose his own line of action. He has to try to find 
out what is in the mind of others. A young German, 
inured to skilled slavery, does not shine in such 
a position. Man for man, in all that asks for initia- 
tive and self-dependence, Englishmen are the better 
men, and some Germans know it. There is an old 
jest that if you settle an Englishman and a German 
together in a new country, at the end of a year you 
will find the Englishman governor, and the German 
his head clerk. A German must know the rules 
before he can get to work. 

More than three hundred years ago a book was 
written in England which is in some ways a very 
exact counterpart to General von Bernhardi's notorious 
treatise. It is called Tamhurlaine, and, unlike its 
successor, is full of poetry and beauty. Our own 
colonization began with a great deal of violent work, 
and much wrong done to others. We suffered for our 
misdeeds^ and we learned our lesson, in part at least. 
Why, it may be asked, should not the Germans begin 
in the same manner, and by degrees adapt themselves 
to the new task ? Perhaps they may, but if they do; 
they cannot claim the Elizabethans for their model. 
Of all men on earth the German is least like the 
undisciplined, exuberant Elizabethan adventurer. He 
is reluctant to go anywhere without a copy of the 
rules, a guarantee of support, and a regular pension. 
His outlook is as prosaic as General von Bernhardi's 



MIGHT IS RJGHT 27 

or General von der Goltz's own, and that is saying 
a great deal. In all the German political treatises 
there is an immeasurable dreariness. They lay down 
rules for life, and if they be asked what makes such 
a life worth living they are without any hint of an 
answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically 
ordered, and full of pusillanimous jealousies. 

It is not impious to be hopeful. A Germanized 
world would be a nightmare. We Lave never at- 
tempted or desired to govern them, and we must not 
think that God will so far forget them as to permit 
them to attempt to govern us. Now they hate us, 
but they do not know for how many years the 
cheerful brutality of their political talk has shocked 
and disgusted us. I remember meeting, in one of the 
French Mediterranean dependencies, with a Prussian 
nobleman, a well-bred and pleasant man, who was 
fond of expounding the Prussian creed. He was said 
to be a political agent of sorts, but he certainly learned 
nothing in conversation. He talked all the time, and 
propounded the most monstrous paradoxes with an 
air of mathematical precision. Now it was the 
character of Sir Edward Grey, a cunning Machiavel, 
whose only aim was to set Europe by the ears and 
make neighbours fall out. A friend who was with 
me, an American, laughed aloud at this, and protested, 
without producing the smallest effect. The stream 
of talk went on. The error of the Germans, we were 
told, was always that they are too humane ; their 
dislike of cruelty amounts to a weakness in them. 
They let France escape with a paltry fine, next time 
France must be beaten to the dust. Always with 



28 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England. 
England was decadent and powerless, her rule must 
pass to the Germans. 'But we shall treat England 
rather less severely than France,' said this bland 
apostle of Prussian culture, ' for we wish to make it 
possible for ourselves to remain in friendly relations 
with other English-speaking peoples.' And so on — 
the whole of the Bernhardi doctrine, explained in 
quiet fashion by a man whose very debility of mind 
made his talk the more impressive, for he was simply 
parroting what he had often heard. No one criticized 
his proposals, nor did we dislike him. It all seemed 
too mad; a rather clumsy jest. His world of ideas 
did not touch our world at any point, so that real 
talk between us was impossible. He came to see us 
several times, a^nd always gave the same kind of 
mesmerized recital of Germany's policy. The gross- 
ness of the whole thing was in curious contrast with 
the polite and quiet voice with which he uttered his 
insolences. When I remember his talk I find it easy 
to believe that the German Emperor and the German 
Chancellor have also talked in such a manner that 
they have never had the smallest opportunity of 
learning what Englishmen think and mean. 

While the German doctrine was the plaything merely 
of hysterical and supersensitive persons, like Carlyle 
and Nietzsche, it mattered little to the world of politics. 
An excitable man, of vivid imagination and invalid 
constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection 
for the cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English 
style is itself a kind of epilepsy. Nietzsche was so 
nervously sensitive that everyday life was an anguish 



MIGHT IS RIGHT 29 

to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as 
Marlowe was a poet, and Iwth sang the song of Power. 
The brutes of the swamp and the field, who gathered 
round them and listened, found nothing new or un- 
familiar in the message of the poets. ' This ', they 
said, * is what we have always known, but we did not 
know that it is poetry. Now that great poets teach 
it, we need no longer be ashamed of it.' So they 
went away resolved to be twice the brutes that they 
were before, and they named themselves Culture- 
brutes. 

It is difficult to see how the world, or any consider- 
able part of it, can belong to Germany, till she changes 
her mind. If she can do that, she might make a good 
ruler, for she has solid virtues and good instincts. It 
is her intellect that has gone wrong. Bishop Butler 
was one day found pondering the problem whether, 
a whole nation can go mad. If he had lived to-day 
what would he have said about it ? Would he have 
a<]mitted that that strangest of grim fancies is realized? 

It would be vain for German}^ to take the world ; 
she could not keep it ; nor, though she can make a vast 
number of people miserable for a long time, could she 
ever hope to make all the inhabitants of the world 
miserable for all time. She has a giant's power, and 
does not think it infamous to use it like a giant. She 
can make a winter hideous, but she cannot prohibit 
the return of spring, or annul the cleansing power of 
water. Sanity is not only better than insanity ; it is 
much stronoer, and Mioht is Rio*ht. 

Meantime, it is a delight and a consolation to 
Englishmen that England is herself again. She has 



30 MIGHT IS RIGHT 

a cause that it is good to fight for, whether it succeed 
or fail. The hope that uplifts her is the hope of 
a better world, which our children shall see. She 
has wonderful friends. From what self-governing 
nations in the world can Germany hear such messages 
as came to England from the Dominions oversea? 
' When England is at war, Canada is at war.' ' To 
the last man and the last shilling, Australia will 
support the cause of- the Empire.' These are simple 
words, and sufficient; having said them, Canada and 
Australia said no more. In the company of such 
friends, and for the creed that she holds, England 
might be proud to die ; but surely her time is not yet. 

Our faith is ours, and comes not on a tide ; 

And whether Earth's great offspring by decree 

Must rot if they abjure rapacity, 

Not argument, but effort shall decide. 

They number many heads in that hard flock, 

Trim swordsmen they push forth, yet try thy steel; 

Thou, fighting for poor human kind, shalt feel 

The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew 

A chasm sheer into the barrier rock, 

And bring the army of the faithful through. 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 

An Address to the Royal Colonial Institute, 
December 12, 1916 

I HOLD, as I daresay you do, that we are at a crisis of 
our history where there is not much room for talk. The 
time when this struggle might have been averted or won 
by talk is long past. During the hundred years before 
the war we have not talked much, or listened much, to 
the Germans. For fifty of those years at least the head 
of waters that has now been let loose in a devastating 
flood over Europe was steadily accumulating ; but we 
paid little attention to it. People sometimes speak of 
the negotiations of the twelve days before the war as if 
the whole secret and cause of the war could be found 
there ; but it is not so. Statesmen, it is true, are the 
keepers of the lock-gates, but those keepers can only 
delay, they cannot prevent an inundation that has great 
natural causes. The world has in it evil enough, and 
darkness enough. But it is not so bad and so dark that 
a slip in diplomacy, a careless word, or an impolite 
gesture, can instantaneously, as if by magic, involve 
twenty million men in a struggle to the death. It is 
only clever, conceited men, proud of their neat little 
minds, who think that because they cannot fathom the 
causes of the war, it might easily have been prevented. 
I confess I find it difficult to conceive of the war in 
terms of simple right and wrong. We must respect the 
tides, and their huge unintelligible force teaches us to 
respect them. 



32 THE WAE OF IDEAS 

It is not a war of race. For all our difPerences with 
the Germans, any cool and impartial mind must admit 
that we have many points of kinship with them. During 
the years before the war our naval officers in the 
Mediterranean found, I believe, that it was easier to 
associate on terms of social friendship with the Austrians 
than with the officers of any other foreign navy. We 
have a passionate admiration for France, and a real 
devotion to her, but that is a love affair, not a family 
tie. We begin to be experienced in love affairs, for 
Ireland steadily refuses to be treated on any other foot- 
ing. In any case, we are much closer to the Germans 
than they are to the Bulgarians or the Turks. Of these 
three we like the Turks the best, because they are 
chivalrous and generous enemies, which the Germans 
are not. 

It is a war of ideas. We are lighting an armed 
doctrine. Yet Burke's use of those words to describe 
the military power of Revolutionary France should warn 
us against fallacious attempts to simplify the issue. 
When ideas become motives and are filtered into 
practice, they lose their clearness of outline and are 
often hard to recognize. They leaven the lump, but the 
lump is still human clay, with its passions and pre- 
judices, its pride and its hate. I remember seeing in a 
provincial paper, in the early days of the war, two 
adjacent columns, both dealing v/ith the war. The first 
was headed ' A Holy War ' and set forth the great 
principles of nationality, respect for treaties, and pro- 
tection of the weak, which in our opinion are the main 
motives of the Allies in this war. The second was 
headed ^ The War on Commerce ; Tips to capture 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 33 

German trade', and set forth those other principles and 
motives which, in the opinion of the Germans, brought 
England into this war. 

I am not going to defend England against the charge 
that she entered this war on a cold calculation of mer- 
cantile profit. Every one here knows that the charge is 
utterly untrue. Those who believe the charge could 
not be shaken in their belief except by being educated 
all over again, and introduced to some knowledge of 
human nature. It is enough to remark that this charge 
is a commonplace between belligerent nations. They all 
like to believe that their adversaries entertain only base 
motives, while they themselves act only on the loftiest 
ideal promptings. If the charge means only that every 
nation at war is bound to think of its own interests, to 
conserve its own strength, and to seize on all material 
gains that are within its reach, the charge is true and 
harmless. When two angry women quarrel in a back 
street, they commonly accuse each other of being amor- 
ous. They might just as well accuse each other of 
being human. The charge is true and insignificant. So 
also with nations ; they all cherish themselves and seek 
to preserve their means of livelihood. 

If this were their sole concern, there would be few 
wars ; certainly this war, which is desolating and im- 
poverishing Europe, would be impossible. No one, 
surely, can look at the war and say that nations are 
moved only by their material interests. It would be 
more plausible to say that they are too little moved by 
those interests. Bacon, in his essay Of Deaths remarks 
that the fear of death does not much affect mankind. 
* There is no passion in the mind of man so weak, but 

21G8 C 



34 THE WAE OF IDEAS 

it mates and masters the fear of death ; and therefore 
death is no such terrible enemy when a man hath so 
many attendants about him that can win the combat of 
him. Kevenge triumphs over death ; love slights it ; 
honour aspireth to it ; grief flieth to it, fear pre-occupateth 
it ; nay, we read, after Otho the Emperor had slain 
himself, pity (which is the tenderest of affections) pro- 
voke^ many to die out of mere compassion to their 
sovereign, and as the truest sort of followers/ If this 
is true of the fear of death, how much truer it is of the 
love of material gain. Any whim, or point of pride, or 
fixed idea, or old habit, is enough to make a man or a 
natiom forgo the hope of profit and fight for a creed. 

The German creed is by this time well known. 
Before the war we took little notice of it. We some- 
times saw it stated in print, but it seemed to us too 
monstrous and inhuman to be the creed of a whole 
people. We were wrong ; it was the creed of a whole 
people. By the mesmerism of State education, by the 
discipline of universal military service, by the pride of 
the German people in their past victories, and by the 
fears natural to a nation that finds enemies on all its 
fronts, an absolute belief in the State, in war as the 
highest activity of the State, and in the right of the 
State to enslave all its subjects, body and soul, to its 
purposes, had become the creed of all those diverse 
peoples that are united under the Prussian Monarchy. 
Most of them are not naturally warlike peoples. They 
have been lured, and frightened, and drilled, and bribed 
into war, but it is true to say that, on the whole, they 
enjoy fighting less than we do. One of the truest 
remarks ever made on the war was that famous remark 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 35 

of a British private soldier who was telling how his 
company took a trench from the enemy. Fearing that 
his account of the afPair might sound boastful, he added, 
^ You see, Sir, they're not a military people, like we 
are.' Only the word was wrong, the meaning was 
right. They are, as every one knows, an enormously 
military people, and, if they want to fight at all, they 
have to be a military people, for the vast majority of 
them are not a warlike people. A first-class army 
could never have been fashioned in Germany out of 
volunteer civilians, like our army on the Somme. That 
army has a little shaken the faith of the Germans in 
their creed. Again I must quote one of our soldiers : 
' I don't say', he remarked, ^ that om- average can run 
rings round their best ; what I say is that our average is 
better than their average, and our best is better than 
their best.' The Germans already are uneasy about 
their creed and their S3^stem, but there is no escape for 
them ; they have sacrificed everything to it ; they have 
impoverished the mind and drilled the imagination of 
every German citizen, so that Germany appears before 
the world with the body of a giant and the mind of a 
dwarf ; they have sacrificed themselves in millions that 
their creed may prevail, and with their creed they nmst 
stand or fall. The State, organized as absolute power, 
responsible to no one, with no duties to its neighbour, 
and with only nominal duties to a strictly subordinate 
God, has challenged the soul of man in its dearest 
possessions. We cannot predict the course of military 
operations ; but if we were not sure of the ultimate issue 
of this great struggle, we should have no suflicient 
motive for continuing to breathe. The State lias 

C3 



36 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

challenged the soul of man before now, and has always 
been defeated. A miserable remnant of men and 
women, tied to stakes or starved in dungeons, have before 
now shattered what seemed an omnipotent tyranny, 
because they stood for the soul and were not prompted 
by vanity or self-regard. They had great allies — 

* Their friends were exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind/ 

If we are defeated we shall be defeated not by Ger 
man strength but by our own weakness. The worst 
enemy of the martyr is doubt and the divided mind, 
which suggests the question, ' Is it, after all, worth 
while?" We must know what we have believed. 
What do we stand for in this war ? It is only tho 
immovable conviction that we stand for something ulti- 
mate and essential that can help us and carry us through. 
No war of this kind and on this scale is good enough to 
fight unless it is good enough to fail in. ^ The calcula- 
tion of profit ', said Burke, ' in all such wars is false. On 
balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogs- 
heads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their 
price. The blood of man should never be shed but to 
redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our 
family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for 
our kind. The rest is vanity ; the rest is crime.' 

The question I have asked is a difficult question to 
answer, or, rather, the answer is not easy to formulate 
briefly and clearly. Most of the men at the front know 
quite well what they are fighting for ; they know that 
it is for their country, but that it is also for their kind 
—-for certain ideals of humanity. We at home know 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 37 

that we are at war for liberty and humanity. But these 
words are invoked by different nations in different 
senses ; the Germans, or at least most of them, have as 
much liberty as they desire, and believe that the highest 
good of humanity is to be found in the prevalence of 
their own ideas and of their own type of government 
and society. No abstract demonstration can help us. 
Liberty is a highly comparative notion ; no one asks for 
it complete. Humanity is a highly variable notion ; it 
is interpreted in different senses by different societies. 
What we are confronted by is two types of character, 
two sets of aims, two ideals for society. There can be 
no harm in trying to understand both. 

The Germans can never be understood by those who 
neglect their history. They are a solid, brave, and 
earnest people, who, till quite recent times, have been 
denied tiieir share in the government of Europe. In 
the sixteenth century they were deeply stirred by 
questions of religion, and were rent asunder by the 
Reformation. Compromise proved futile ; the small 
German states were ranked on this side or on that at 
the will of their rulers and princes ; men of the same 
race were ranged in mortal opposition on the question 
of religious belief, and there was no solution but war. 
For thirty years in the seventeenth century the war 
raged. It was conducted with a fierceness and in- 
humanity that even the present war has not equalled. 
The civilian population suffered hideously. Whole pro- 
vinces were desolated and whole states were bereaved of 
their men. When, from mere exhaustion, the war came 
to an end, Germany lay prostrate, and the chief gains of 
the war fell to the rising monarchy of France, which had 



38 THE WAE OF IDEAS 

intervened in the middle of the struggle. By the Treaty 
of Westphalia in 164:8 Alsace and Lorraine went to 
France, and the rule of the great monarchy Louis XIV, 
had nothing to fear from the German peoples. Tho 
ambitions of German}^, for long after this, were mainly 
cosmopolitan and intellectual. But political ambitions, 
though they seemed almost dead, were revived by the 
hardy state of Prussia, and the rest of Germany's history, 
down to om- own time, is the history of the welding of 
the Germanic peoples into a single state by Prussian 
monarchs and statesmen. 

This history explains many things. If a people has 
a corporate memory, if it can learn from its own suffer- 
ings, Germany has reason enough to cherish with a 
passionate devotion her late achieved unity. And Ger- 
man brutality, which is not the less brutality because 
Germans regard it as quite natural and right, has its 
origin in German history. The Prussian is a Spartan, 
a natural brute, but brutal to himself as well as to 
others, capable of extremes of self-denial and self- 
discipline. From the Prussians the softer and more 
emotional German peoples of the South received the 
gift of national unity, and they repaid the debt bv 
extravagant admiration for Prussian prow^ess and hardi- 
hood, which had been so serviceable to their cause. The 
Southern Germans, the Bavarians especially, have de- 
* veloped a sort of sentimentalism of brutality, expressed 
in the hysterical Hymn of Hate (which hails from 
Munich), expressed also in those monstrous excesses 
and cruelties, surpassing anything that mere insensibility 
can produce, which have given the Bavarian troops their 
foul reputation in the present war. 



THE WAK OF IDEAS 39 

The last half century of German history must also 
be remembered. Three assaults on neighbouring states 
were rewarded by a great increase of territory and of 
strength. From Denmark, in 1864, Prussia took 
Schleswig-Holstein. The defeat of Austria in 1866 
brought Hanover and Bavaria under the Prussian 
leadership ; Alsace and Lorraine were regained from 
France in 1870. The Prussian mind, which is not 
remarkable for subtlety, found a justification in these 
three wars for its favourite doctrine of frightfulness. 
That doctrine, put briefly, is that people can always be 
frightened into submission, and that it is cheaper to 
frighten them than to fight them to the bitter end. 
Denmark was a small nation, and moreover was left 
utterly unsupported by the European powers who had 
guaranteed her integrity. Bavaria was frightened, and 
will be frightened again when her hot fit gives way to 
her cold fit. France was divided and half-hearted 
under a tinsel emperor. It is Germany's misfortune 
that on these three special cases she based a general 
doctrine of war. A very little knowledge of human 
nature — a knowledge so alien to her that she calls it 
psychology and assigns it to specialists — would have 
taught her that, for the most part, human beings when 
they are fighting for their homes and their faith cannot 
be frightened, and must be killed, or conciliated. The 
practice of frightfulness has not worked very well in 
this war. It has steeled the heart of Germany's enemies. 
It has produced in her victims a temper of hat© that 
will outlivo this generation, and will make the small 
peoples whom she has kicked and trampled on im- 
possible Bubjocts of the German Empire. Worst of all, 



40 THE WAK OF IDEAS 

it has suggested to onlookers that the people who have 
so plenary a belief in frightfulness are not themselves 
strangers to fear. There is an old English proverb, 
hackneyed and stale three hundred years ago, but now 
freshened again by disuse, that the^ goodwife would 
never have looked for her daughter in the oven unless 
she had been there herself. 

How shall I describe the English temper, which the 
Germans, high and low, learned and ignorant, have so 
profoundly mistaken ? You can get no description of 
it from the Englishman pure and simple ; he has no 
theory of himself, and it bores him to hear himself 
described. Yet it is this temper which has given 
England her great place in the world and which has 
cemented the British Empire. It is to be found not in 
England alone, but wherever there is a strain of English 
blood or an acceptance of English institutions. You 
can find it in Australia, in Canada, in America ; it 
infects Scotland, and impresses Wales. It is every- 
where in our trenches to-day. It is not clannish, or 
even national, it is essentially the lonely temper of 
a man independent to the verge of melancholy. An 
admirable French writer of to-day has said that the best 
handbook and guide to the English temper is Defoe's 
romance of Bohinson Crusoe. Crusoe is practical, but 
is conscious of the over-shadowing presence of the 
things that are greater than man. He makes his own 
clothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in 
thought with the problems suggested by his Bible. 
Another example of the same temper may be seen in 
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and yet another in 
Wordsworth's Prelude. There is no danger that 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 41 

English thought will ever underestimate the value and 
meaning of the individual soul. The greatest English 
literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare's 
Hamlet to Browning's The Ring and the Booh, is con- 
cerned with no other subject. The age-long satire 
against the English is that in England every man 
claims the right to go to heaven his own way. English 
institutions, instead of subduing men to a single pattern, 
are devised chiefly with the object of saving the rights 
of the subject and the liberty of the individual. ' Every 
man m his hmuour ' is an English proverb, and might 
almost be a statement of English constitutional doctrine. 
But this extreme individualism is the right of all, and 
does not favour self-exaltation. The English temper 
has an almost morbid dislike of all that is showy or 
dramatic in expression. I remember how a Winchester 
boy, when he was reproached with the fact that Win- 
chester has produced hardly any great men, replied, 
' No, indeed, I should think not. We would pretty 
soon have knocked that out of them.' And the epigrams 
of the English temper usually take the form of under- 
statement. ^ Give Dayrolles a chair ' were the last 
dying words of Lord Chesterfield, spoken of the friend 
who had come to see him. When the French troops 
go over the parapet to make an advance, their battle 
cry shouts the praises of their country. The British 
troops prefer to celebrate the advance in a more trivial 
fashion, ^This way to the early door, sixpence extra.' 

I might go on interminably with this dissertation, but 
I have said enough for my purpose. The history of 
England has had much to do with moulding the 
English temper. We have been protected from direct 



42 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

exposure to the storms that have swept the Continent. 
Our wars on land have been adventures undertaken by 
exjDeditionary forces. At sea, while the power of 
England was growing, we have been explorers, pirates, 
buccaneers. Now that we are involved in a great 
European war on land, our methods have been changed. 
The artillery and infantry of a modern army cannot act 
effectively on their own impulse. We hold the sea, 
and the pirates' work for the present has passed into 
other hands. But our spirit and temper is the same as 
of old. It has found a new world in the air. War in 
the air, under the conditions of to-day, demands all the 
old gallantry and initiative. The airman depends on 
his own brain and nerve ; he camiot fall back on orders 
from his superiors. Our airmen of to-day are the true 
inheritors of Drake ; they have the same inspired reck- 
lessness, the same coolness, and the same chivahy to 
a vanquished enemy. 

I am a very bad example of the English temper ; for 
the English temper grumbles at all this, to the great 
rehef of our enemies, who believe that what a man 
admits against his own nation must be true. Our 
pessimists, by indulging their natural vein, serve us, 
without reward, quite as well as Germany is served by 
her wireless press. They deceive the enemy. 

Modern Germany has organized and regimented her 
people like an ant-hill or a beehive. The people them- 
selves, including many who belong to the upper class, 
are often simple villagers in temper, full of kindness 
and anger, much subject to envy and jealousy, not 
magnanimous, docile and obedient to a fault. If they 
claimed, as individuals, to represent the highest reach 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 43 

of European civilization, the claim would be merely 
absurd. So they shift their ground, and pretend that 
society is greater than man, and that by their pains- 
taking organization their society has been raised to the 
pinn?icle of human greatness. They make this claim so 
insistently, and in such obvious good faith, that some 
few weak tempers and foolish minds in England have 
been impressed by it. These panic-stricken counsellors 
advise us, without delay, to reform our institutions and 
organize them upon the German model. Only thus, 
they tell us, can we hold our own against so huge 
a power. But if we were to take their advice, we 
should have nothing of our own left to hold. It is 
reasonable and good to co-operate and organize in order 
to attain an agreed object, but German organization 
goes far beyond this. The German nation is a carefully 
built, smooth-running machine, with powerful engines. 
It has only one fault- -that any fool can drive it ; and 
*seeing that the governing class in Germany is obstinate 
and unimaginative, there is no lack of drivers to pilot 
it to disaster. The best ability of Germany is seen in 
her military organization. Napoleon is her worshipped 
model, and, like many admirers of Napoleon, she thinks 
only of his great campaigns ; she forgets that he died 
in St. Helena, and that his schemes for the reorganiza- 
tion of Europe failed. 

I know that many people in Enghind are not daunted 
but depressed by the military successes of the enemy. 
Our soldiers in the field are not depressed. But we 
who are kept at home suffer from tlie miasma of the 
back-parlour. We read the headlines of newspapers — 
a form of literature that is exciting enough, but does 



44 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

not merit the praise given to Sophocles, who saw life 
steadily and saw it whole. We keep our ears to the 
telephone, and we forget that the great causes which 
are always at work, and which will shape the issues of 
this war, are not recorded upon the telephone. There 
are things truer and more important than the latest 
dispatches. Here is one of them. The organization of 
the second-rate can never produce anything first-rate. 
We do not understand a people who, when it comes to 
the last push of man against man, throw up their hands 
and utter the pathetic cry of ' Kamerad '. To surrender 
is a weakness that no one who has not been under 
modern artillery fire has any right to condemn ; to 
profess a sudden affection for the advancing enemy is 
not weakness but baseness. Or rather, it would be 
baseness in a voluntary soldier ; in the Germans it 
means only that the war is not their own war ; that 
they are fighting as slaves, not as free men. The idea 
that we could ever live under the rule of these people 
is merely comic. To do them justice, they do not now 
entertain the idea, though they have dallied with it in 
the past. 

No harm can be done, I think, by preaching to the 
English people the necessity for organization and dis- 
cipline. We shall still be ourselves, and there is no 
danger that we shall overdo discipline or make organiza- 
tion a thing to be worshipped for its own sake. The 
danger is all the other way. We have learnt much 
from the war, and the work that we shall have to do 
when it ends is almost more important than the terms 
of peace, or concessions made this way and that. If 
the treacherous assault of the Germans on the liberties 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 45 

and peace of Europe is rewarded by any solid gain to 
the German Empire, then history may forgive them, 
but this people of the British Empire will not forgive 
them. Nothing will be as it was before ; and our 
cause, which will not be lost in the war, will still have 
to be won in the so-called peace. I know that some 
say, ^ Let us have war when we are at war, and peace 
when we are at peace '. It sounds plausible and mag- 
nanimous, but it is Utopian. You must reckon with 
your own people. They know that when we last had 
peace, the sunshine of that peace was used by the 
Germans to hatch the spawn of malice and treason. If 
the Germans are defeated in the war, we shall, I sup- 
pose, forgive them, for the very English reason that it 
is a bore not to forgive your enemies. But if they 
escape without decisive defeat in battle, their harder 
trial is yet to come. 

In some ways we are stronger than we have been 
in all our long history. We have found ourselves, 
and we have found our friends. Our dead have taught 
the children of to-day more and better than any living 
teachers can teach them. No one in this country will 
ever forget how the people of the Dominions, at the 
first note of war, sprang to arms like one man. We 
must not thank or praise them ; like the Navy, they 
regard our thanks and praise as something of an imper- 
tinence. They are not fighting, they say, for us. But 
that is how we discovered them. They are doing much 
better than fighting for us, they are fighting with us, 
because, without a word of explanation or appeal, their 
ideas and ours are the same. We never have discussed 
with them, and we never shall discuss, what is decent 



46 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

and clean and honourable in human behaviour. A philo- 
sopher who is interested in this question can find plenty 
of intellectual exercise by discussing it with the Germans. 
Where an Englishman, a Canadian, and an Australian 
are met, there is no material for such a debate. 

It would be extravagant to suppose that a discovery 
like this can leave our future relations untouched. We 
now know that we are profoundly united in a union 
much stronger and deeper than any mechanism can 
produce. I know how difficult a problem it is to hit 
on the best device for giving political expression to this 
union between States separated from one another by 
the whole world's diameter, differing in their circum- 
stances, their needs, and their outlook. I do not dare 
to prescribe ; but I should like to make a few remarks, 
and to call attention to a few points which are perhaps 
more present to the mind of the ordinary citizen than 
they are in the discussions of constitutional experts. 

We must arrange for co-operation and mutual sup- 
port. If the arrangement is complicated and lengthy, 
we must not wait for it ; we must meet and discuss 
our common affairs. Ministers from the Dominions 
have already sat with the British Cabinet. We can 
never go back on that ; it is a landmark in our history. 
Our Ministers must travel ; if their supporters are 
impatient of their absence on the affairs of the Empire, 
they must find some less parochial set of supporters. 
We have begun in the right way ; the right way is 
not to pass laws determining what you are to do ; but 
to do what is needful, and do it at once, — do a lot of 
things, and regularize your successes by later legisla- 
tion. Now is the time, while the Empire is white-liot, 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 47 

Our first need is not lawyers, but men who, feeling 
friendly, know how to behave as friends do. They 
will not be impeached if they go beyond the letter of 
the law. One act of faith is worth a hundred argu- 
ments. This is a ftunily affair ; the habits of an 
affectionate and united family are the only good 
model. 

As for the Crown Colonies and India, the Dominions 
must share our burden. It is objected, both here and 
in India, that life in the Dominions is a very inadequate 
education for the sympathetic handling of alien races 
and customs. So is life in many parts of this island. 
The fact is that the process of learning to govern these 
alien peoples is the best education in the world. The 
Indian Civil Service is a great College, and it governs 
India. I can speak to this point, for I have lived 
there and seen it at work. If India were really 
governed by the ideas of the young novices who go 
out there fresh from their examinations, she would 
be a distressful country. But the novice is taken in 
hand at once by the older members of the service ; 
he works under the eye of the Collector and the 
Assistant Collector ; they shoulder him and instruct 
him as tame elephants shoulder and instruct the wild ; 
they are kind to him, and he lives m their company 
while his prejudices and follies peel off him ; so that 
within a few years he becomes a tolerant, wise, and 
devoted civil servant, who speaks the language of the 
College and is proud to belong to it. The success of 
the Government of India is not to be credited to the 
classes from which the Civil Service is recruited, but 
to the discipline of the Service itself, a Service so liigh 



48 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

in tradition and so free from corruption that advance- 
ment in it is to be gained only by intelligence and 
sympathy. What I am saying is that I can imagine 
no finer raw material for the political discipline of the 
Indian Civil Service than some of the generous and 
clean-run spirits who have come from the Dominions 
to help in this war. They could be introduced to 
a share of our responsibilities without impeding or 
retarding the movement to give to selected natives of 
India a larger share in the government of their 
country. 

But the war is not over, so I return to the main 
issue — the conflict between the English idea and the 
German idea of world government. It is not an 
accident, as Baron von Hiigel remarks in his book on 
The German Soul, that the chief colonizing nation of 
the world should be a nation without a national army. 
We have depended enormously in the past on the 
initiative and virtue of the individual adventurer; if 
our adventurers were to fail us, which is not likely, 
or if the State were to supersede them, and attempt 
to do their work, which is not conceivable, our political 
power and influence would vanish with them. The 
world might perhaps be well ordered, but there would 
be no freedom, and no fun. The beauty of the adven- 
turer is that he is practically invincible. He does not 
wait for orders. Under the most perfect police system 
that Germany could devise, he would be up and at it 
again. We are not so numerous as the Germans, but 
there are enough and to spare of us to make German 
government impossible in any place where we pitch 
our tents. We are practised hands at upsetting 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 49 

governments. Our political system is a training school 
for rebels. This is what makes our very existence an 
offence to the moral instincts of the German people. 
They are quite right to want to kill us ; the only way 
to abolish fun and freedom is to abolish life. But 
I must not be unjust to them ; their forethought 
provides for everything, and no doubt they would 
prescribe authorized forms of fun for half an hour a 
week, and would gather together their subjects in 
public assembly, under municipal regulations, to per- 
form approved exercises in freedom. 

Mankind lives by ideas ; and if an irreconcilable 
difference in ideas makes a good war, then this is 
a good war. The contrast between the two ideas is 
profound and far-reaching. My business lies in a Uni- 
versity. For a good many years before the war certain 
selected German students, who had had a University 
education in their own country, came as Rhodes scholars 
to Oxford. The intention of Mr. Rhodes was benevo- 
lent ; he thought that if German students were to 
reside for four years at Oxford and to associate there, 
at an impressionable time of life, with young English- 
men, understanding and fellowship would be encouraged 
between the two peoples. But the German govern- 
ment took care to defeat Mr. Rhodes's intention. Instead 
of sending a small number of students for the full 
period, as Mr. Rhodes had provided, Germany asked 
and (by whose mistake I do not know) obtained 
leave to send a larger number for a shorter stay. The 
students selected were intended for the political and 
diplomatic service, and were older than the usual run 
of Oxford freshmen. Their behaviour had a certain 

8168 X) 



50 THE WAR OF IDEAS 

ambassadorial flavour abaut it. They did not mix 
much in the many undergraduate societies which flourish 
in a college, but met together in clubs of their own to 
drink patriotic toasts. They were nothing if not 
superior. I remember a conversation I had with one 
of them who came to consult me. He wished, he 
said, to do some definite piece of research work in 
English literature. I asked him what problems or 
questions in English literature most interested him, 
and he replied that he would do anything that I 
advised. We had a talk* of some length, wholly at 
cross-purposes. At last I tried to make my point of 
view clear by reminding him that research means 
finding the answer to a question, and that if his reading 
of English literature, which had been fairly extensive, 
had suggested no questions to his mind, he was not 
in the happiest possible position to begin research. 
This touched his national pride, and he gave me 
something not unlike a lecture. In Germany, he 
said, the professor tells you what you are to do ; he 
gives you a subject for investigation, he names the 
books you are to read, and advises you on what you 
are to write ; you follow his advice, and produce 
a thesis, which gains you the degree of Doctor of 
Letters. I have seen a good many of these theses, and 
I am sure this account is correct. With very rare 
exceptions they are as dead as mutton, and much less 
nourishing. The upshot of our conversation was that 
he thought me an incompetent professor, and I thought 
him an unprofitable student. 

There are many people in England to-day who praise 
the thoroughness of the Germans, and their devotion 



THE WAR OF IDEAS 51 

to systematic thought. Has any one ever taken the 
trouble to trace the development of the thesis habit, 
and its influence on their national life ? They theorize 
everything, and they believe in their theories. They 
have solemn theories of the English character, of the 
French character, of the nature of war, of the history 
of the world. No breath of scepticism dims their 
complacency, although events steadily prove their 
theories wrong. They have courage, and when they 
are seeking truth by the process of reasoning, they 
accept the conclusions attained by the process, however 
monstrous these conclusions may be. They not only 
accept them, they act upon them, and, as every one 
knows, their behaviour in Belgium was dictated to 
them by their philosophy. 

Thought of this kind is the enemy of the human 
race. It intoxicates sluggish minds, to whom thought 
is not natural. It suppresses all the gentler instincts 
of the heart and supplies a basis of orthodoxy for all 
the cruelty and treachery in the world. I do not 
know, none of us knows, when or how this war will 
end. But I know that it is worth fighting to the end, 
whatever it may cost to all and each of us. We may 
have peace with the Germans, the peace of exhaustion 
or the peace that is only a breathing space in a long 
struggle. We can never have peace with the German 
idea. It was not the idea of the older German thinkers 
— of Kant, or of Goethe, who were good Europeans. 
Kant said that there is nothing good in the world 
except the good will. The modern Gorman doctrine 
is that there is nothing good in the world except what 
tends to the power and giory of the State. The iu- 

d2 



53 THE WAE OF IDEAS 

ventor of this doctrine, it may be remembered, was the 
Devil, who offered to the Son of Man the glory of all 
the kingdoms of the world, if only He would fall dow^n 
and worship him. The Germans, exposed to a like 
temptation, have accepted the offer and have fulfilled 
the condition. They can have no assurance that faith 
will be kept with them. On the other hand, we can 
have no assurance that they will suffer any signal or 
dramatic reverse. Human history does not usually 
observe the laws of melodrama. But we know that 
their newly purchased doctrine can be fought, in war 
and in peace, and we know that in the end it will not 
prevail. 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

An Address to the Union Society of University 
College, London, March 22, 1917 

When Professor W. P. Ker asked me to address you 
on this ceremonial occasion I felt none of the confi- 
dence of the man who knows what he wants to say, 
and is looking for an audience. But Professor Ker 
is my old friend, and this place is the place where 
I picked up many of those fragmentary impressions 
which I suppose must be called my education. So 
I thought it would be ungrateful to refuse, even 
though it should prove that I have nothing to express 
save goodwill and the affections of memory. 

When I matriculated in the University of London 
and became a student in this place, my professors 
were Professor Goodwin, Professor Church, Professor 
Henrici, Professor Croom Robertson, and Professor 
Henry Morley. I remember all these, though, if they 
were alive, I do not think that any of them would 
remember me. The indescribable exhilaration, which 
must be familiar to many of you, of leaving school and 
entering college, is in great part the exhilaration of 
making acquaintance with teachers who care much 
about their subject and little or nothing about their 
pupils. To escape from the eternal personal judge- 
ments which make a school a place of torment is to 
walk upon air. The schoolmaster looks at you ; the 
college professor looks the way you arc looking. The 
statements made by Euclid, that thoughtful Greek, 



54 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

are no longer encumbered at college with all those 
preposterous and irrelevant moral considerations which 
desolate the atmosphere of a school. The question 
now is not whether you have perfectly acquainted 
yourself with what Euclid said, but whether what he 
said is true. In my earliest days at college I heard 
a complete exposition of the first six books of Euclid, 
given in four lectures, with masterly ease and free- 
dom, by Professor Henrici, who did not hesitate to 
employ methods of demonstration which, though they . 
are perfectly legitimate and convincing, were rejected 
by the daintiness of the Greek. Professor Groom 
Robertson introduced his pupils to the mysteries of 
mental and moral philosophy, and incidentally dis- 
afiected some of us by what seemed to us his exces- 
sive reverence for the works of Alexander Bain. 
Those works were our favourite theme for satirical 
verse, which we did not pain our Professor by publish- 
ing. Professor Henry Morley lectured hour after hour 
to successive classes in a room half way down the 
passage, on the left. Even overwork could not deaden 
his enormous vitality ; but I hope that his immediate 
successor does not lecture so often. Outside the class- 
rooms I remember the passages, which resembled the 
cellars of an unsuccessful sculptor, the library, where 
I first read Romeo and Juliet, and the refectory, where 
we discussed human life in most, if not in all, of its 
aspects. In the neighbourhood of the College there 
was the classic severity of Gower Street, and, for those 
who preferred the richer variety of romance, there 
was always the Tottenham Court Road. Beyond all, 
and throughout all, there was friendship, and there 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 55 

was freedom. The College was founded, I believe, 
partly in the interests of those who object to subscribe 
to a conclusion before they are permitted to examine 
the grounds for it. It has always been a free place ; 
and if I remember it as a place of delight, that is 
because I found here the delights of freedom. 

My thoughts in these days are never very long 
away from the War, so that I should feel it difficult 
to speak of anything else. Yet there are so many 
ways in which it would be unprofitable for me to pre- 
tend to speak of it, that the difficulty remains. I have 
no knowledge of military or naval strategy. I am not 
intimately acquainted with Germany or with German 
culture. I could praise our own people, and our own 
fighting men, from a full heart ; but that, I think, is 
not exactly what you want from me. So I am reduced 
to attempting what we have all had to attempt during 
the past two years or more, to try to state, for myself 
as much as for you, the meaning of this War so far as 
we can perceive it. 

It seems to be a decree of fate that this country 
shall be compelled every hundred years to fight for her 
very life. We live in an island that lies across the 
mouths of the Rhine, and guards the access to all the 
ports of northern Europe. In this island we have had 
enough safety and enough leisure to develop for our- 
selves a system of constitutional and individual liberty 
which has had an enormous influence on other nations. 
It has been admired and imitated ; it has also been 
hated and attacked. To the majority of European 
statesmen and politicians it has been merely unin- 



56 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

telligible. Some of them have regarded it with a 
kind of superstitious reverence ; for we have been 
very successful in the world at large, and how could 
so foolish and ineffective a system achieve success 
except by adventitious aid 1 Others, including all the 
statesmen and political theorists who prepared Ger^ 
many for this War, have refused to admire ; the power 
of England, they have taught, is not real power ; she 
has been crafty and lucky ; she has kept herself free 
from the entanglements and strifes of the Continent, 
and has enriched herself by filching the property of 
the combatants. If once she were compelled to hold 
by force what she won by guile, her pretensions would 
collapse, and she would fall back into her natural 
position as a small agricultural island, inhabited by 
a people whose proudest boast would then be that 
they are poor cousins of the Germans. 

It is difficult to discuss this question with German 
professors and politicians: they have such simple 
minds, and they talk like angry children. Their 
opinions concerning England are not original; their 
views were held with equal fervour and expressed in 
very similar language by Philip of Spain in the six- 
teenth century, by Louis XIV of France in the seven- 
teenth century, and by Napoleon at the close of the 
eighteenth century. 'These all died in faith, not 
having received the promises, but having seen them 
afar ofi*.' I will ask you to consider the attack 
made upon England by each of these three powerful 
rulers. 

Any one who reads the history of these three great 
wars will feel a sense of illusion, as if he were read- 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 57 

ing the history of to-day. The points of resemblance 
in all four wars are so many and so great that it seems 
as if the four wars were all one war, repeated every 
century. The cause of the war is always an ambitious 
ruler who covets supremacy on the European Conti- 
nent. England is always opposed to him — inevitably 
and instinctively. It took the Germans twenty years 
to prepare their people for this War. It took us two 
days to prepare ours. Our instinct is quick and 
sound ; for the resources and wealth of the Continent, 
if once they were controlled by a single autocratic 
power, would make it impossible for England to follow 
her fortunes upon the sea. But we never stand quite 
alone. The smaller peoples of the Continent, who 
desire self-government, or have achieved it, always 
give the conqueror trouble, and rebel against him or 
resist him. England always sends help to them, the 
help of an expeditionary force, or, failing that, the 
help of irregular volunteers. Sir Philip Sidney dies 
at Zutphen ; Sir John Moore at Corunna. There is 
always desperate fighting in the Low Countries ; and 
the names of Mons, Liege, Namur, and Idlle recur 
again and again. England always succeeds in main- 
taining herself, though not without some reverses, on 
the sea. In the end the power of the master of legions, 
Philip, Louis, Napoleon, and shall we say William, 
crumbles and melts; his ambitions are too costly to 
endure, his people chafe under his lash, and his king- 
dom falls into insignificance or is transformed by 
internal revolution. 

In all these wars there is one other resemblance 
which it is good to remember to-day. The position 



58 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

of England, at one time or another in the course of 
the war, always seems desperate. When Philip of 
Spain invaded England with the greatest navy of the 
world, he was met on the seas by a fleet made up 
chiefly of volunteers. When Louis overshadowed 
Europe and threatened England, our king was in his 
pay and had made a secret treaty with him ; our 
statesmen, moreover, had destroyed our alliance with 
the maritime powers of Sweden and Holland, we had 
war with the Dutch, and our fleet was beaten by them. 
During the war against Napoleon we were in an even 
worse plight; the plausible political doctrines of the 
Revolution found many sympathizers in this country ; 
our sailors mutinied at the Nore ; Ireland was aflame 
with discontent ; and we were involved in the Mah- 
ratta War in India, not to mention the naval war 
with America. Even after Trafalgar, our European 
allies failed us. Napoleon disposed of Austria and 
Prussia, and concluded a separate treaty with Russia. 
It was then that Wordsworth wrote — 

' 'Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know 
That in ourselves our safety must be sought ; 
That by our own right hands it must be wrought ; 
That we must stand unpropped, or be laid low. 
O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer I 
We shall exult, if they who rule the land • 
Be men who hold its many blessings dear, 
Wise, upright, valiant ; not a servile band, 
Who are to judge of dangers which they fear, 
And honour which they do not understand.' 

Always in the same cause, we have suflered worse 
things than we are sufiering to-day, and if there is 
worse to come we hope that we are ready. The youngest 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 59 

and best of us, who carry on and go through with it, 
though many of them are dead and many more will 
not live to see the day of victory, have been easily 
the happiest and most confident among us. They 
have believed that, at a price, they can save decency 
and civilization in Europe, and, if they are wrong, 
they have known, as we know, that the day when 
decency and civilization are trampled under the foot 
of the brute is a day when it is good to die. 

When I speak of the German nation as the brute 
I am not speaking controversially or rhetorically ; the 
whole German nation has given its hearty assent to 
a brutal doctrine of war and politics ; no facts need be 
disputed between us : what to us is their shame^ to 
them is their glory. This is a grave diflference ; yet it 
would be wrong to suppose that we can treat it ade- 
quately by condemning the whole German nation as 
a nation of confessed criminals. It is the paradox of 
war that there is always right on both sides. When 
a man is ready and willing to sacrifice his life, you 
cannot deny him the right to choose what he will die 
for. The most beautiful virtues, faith and courage 
and devotion, grow like weeds upon the battle-field. 
The fighters recognize these virtues in each other, and 
the front lines, for all their mud and slaughter, are 
breathed on by the airs of heaven. Hate and pusilla- 
nimity have little there to nourish them. To find the 
meaner passions you must seek further back. Johnson, 
speaking in the Idler of the calamities produced by 
war, admits that he does not know ' whether more is 
to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accus- 
tomed to plunder, or Irom garrets tilled with scribblers 



60 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

accustomed to lie '. Now that our army is the nation 
in arms, the danger from a lawless soldiery has be- 
come less, or has vanished ; but the other danger has 
increased. Journalists are not the only ojffenders. It 
is a strange, squalid background for the nobility of the 
soldier that is made by the deceits and boasts of diplo- 
matists and statesmen. In one of the prison camps of 
England, some weeks ago, I saw a Saxon boy who had 
fought bravely for his country. Simplicity and open- 
ness and loyalty were written on his face. There are 
hundreds like him, and I would not mention him 
if it were not that that same day I read with a 
new and heightened sense of disgust a speech by the 
German Chancellor, writhing with timidity and dis- 
honesty and uneasy braggadocio. Those who feel 
this contrast as I did may be excused, I think, if they 
come to the conclusion that to talk about war is an 
accursed trade, and that to fight well, whether on the 
one side or the other, is the only noble part. 

Yet there is no escape for us ; if we are to avoid 
chaos, if the daily life of the world is to be re-estab- 
lished and carried on, there must be an understanding 
between nations, and there is no possible way to come 
to an understanding save hy the action and words of 
representative men on the one side and the other. Such 
representative men there are; there is no reason to 
doubt that they do in the main truly express the 
aspirations and wishes of their people, and on both 
sides they have either explicitly or virtually made 
offers. The offer of the Allied Powers is on record. 
What does Germany offer ? She has refused to make 
a definite statement, but her rulers have talked a 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 61 

great deal, and what she intends is not really in doubt ; 
onl}^ she is not sure whether she can get it, and still 
clings to the hope that a favourable turn of events 
may relieve her of the duty of making proposals, and 
put her in a position to dictate a settlement. We all 
know what that settlement would be. 

The German offer for a solution of the problem of 
world-government is German sentiments, German 
racial pride, German manners and customs, an immense 
increase of German territory and German influence, 
and above all an acknowledged supremacy for the 
German race among the nations of the world. She 
thinks she has not stated these aims in so many 
words; but she has. When it was suggested that 
the future peace of the world might be assured by 
the formation of a League to Enforce Peace, Germany, 
through her official spokesmen, expressed her sym- 
pathy with that idea, and stated that she would very 
gladly put herself at the head of such a League. 
I can hardly help loving the Germans when their 
rustic simplicity and rustic cunning lead them all 
unconsciously into self-revelation. The very idea of 
a League to Enforce Peace implies equality among 
the contracting parties ; and Germany does not under- 
stand equality. ' By all means ', she says, ' let us sit 
at a round table, and I will sit at the top of it.' 
Her panacea for human ills is Germanism. She has 
nothing to offer but a purely national sentiment, 
which some, greatly privileged, may share, and the 
rest must revere and bow to. In the Book of Genesis 
we are told how Joseph was thrown into a pit ])y his 
elder brothers for talking just like this ; but he meant 



62 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

it quite innocently, and so do the Germans. They do 
not intend irreverence to God when they call Him the 
good German God. On the contrary, they choose for 
His praise a word that to them stands for all goodness 
and all greatness. Their worship expresses itself 
naturally in the tribal ritual and the tribal creed. 
This tribal creed, there can be no doubt, is what they 
offer us for a talisman to ensure the right ordering of 
the world. 

Patriotism and loyalty to hearth and home are 
passions so strong in humanity that a creed like this, 
when men are under its influence, is not easily seen 
to be absurd. The Saxon boy, whom I saw in his 
prison camp, probably would not quarrel with it. 
And even in the wider world of thought the illusions 
of nationalism are all-pervading. I once heard Pro- 
fessor Henry Sidgwick remark that it is not easy for 
us to understand how the troops of Portugal are 
stirred to heroic effort when their commanders call 
on them to remember that they are Portuguese. He 
would no doubt have been the first to admit, for he 
had an alert and sceptical mind, that it is only our 
stupidity which finds anything comic in such an 
appeal. But it is stupidity of this kind which unfits 
men to deal with other races, and it is stupidity of 
this kind which has been exalted by the Germans as 
a primal duty, and has, indeed, been advanced by 
them as their principal claim to undertake the govern- 
ment of the world. 

This extreme nationalism, this unwillingness to feel 
any sympathy for other peoples, or to show them any 
consideration, has stupefied and blinded the Germans. 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 63 

One of tlie heaviest charges that can be brought 
against them is that they have seen no virtue in 
France. I do not ask that they shall interrupt the 
War to express admiration for their enemies : I am 
speaking of the time before the War. France is the 
chief modern inheritor of that great Roman civiliza- 
tion which found us painted savages, and made us 
into citizens of the world. The French mind, it is 
admitted, and admitted most readily by the most 
intelligent men, is quick and delicate and perceptive, 
surer and clearer in its operation than the average 
European mind. Yet the Germans, infatuated with 
a belief in their own numbers and their own brute 
strength, have dared to express contempt for the 
genius of France. A contempt for foreigners is 
common enough among the vulgar and unthinking 
of all nations, but I do not believe that you will 
find anywhere but in Germany a large number of 
men trained in the learned professions who are so 
besotted by vanity as to deny to France her place in 
the vanguard of civilization. These louts cannot be 
informed or argued with; they are interested in no 
one but themselves, and naked self-assertion is their 
only idea of political argument. Treitschke, who was 
for twenty years Professor of History at Berlin, and 
who did perhaps more than any other man to build 
up the modern German creed, has crystallized German 
politics in a single sentence. ' War ', he says, ' is politics 
'p(tr excellence! that is to say, politics at their purest 
and highest. Our political doctrine, if it must be put 
in as brief a form, would be better expressed in the 
sentence, ' War is the failure of politics '. 



64 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

If England were given over to nationalism as 
Germany is given over, then a war between these 
two Powers, though it would still be a great dramatic 
spectacle, would have as little meaning as a duel 
between two rival gamebirds in a cockpit. We 
know, and it will some day dawn on the Germans, 
that this War has a deeper meaning thf.n that. We 
are not nationalist; we are too deeply experienced 
in politics to stumble into that trap. We have had 
a better and longer political education than has come 
to Germany in her short and feverish national life. 
It is often said that the Germans are better educated 
than we are, and in a sense that is true; they are 
better furnished with schools and colleges and the 
public means of education. The best boy in a school 
is the boy who best minds his book, and even if he 
dutifully believes all that it tells him, that will not 
lose him the prize. When he leaves school and 
graduates in a wider world, where men must depend 
on their own judgement and their own energy, he is 
often a little disconcerted to find that some of his less 
bookish fellows easily outgo him in quickness of 
understanding and resource. German education is 
too elaborate ; it attempts to do for its pupils much 
that they had better be left to do for themselves. 
The pupils are docile and obedient, not troubled with 
unruly doubts and questionings, so that the German 
system of public education is a system of public 
mesmerism, and, now that we see it in its efiects, 
may be truly described as a national disease. 

I have said that England is not nationalist. If the 
English believed in England as the Germans believe 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 65 

in Germany, there would be nothing for it but a duel 
to the death, the extinction of one people or the other, 
and darkness as the burier of the dead. Peace would 
be attained by a great simplification and impoverish- 
ment of the world. But the English do not believe 
in themselves in that mad-bull fashion. They come 
of mixed blood, and have been accustomed for many 
long centuries to settle their differences by compromise 
and mutual accommodation. They do not inquire 
too curiously into a man's descent if he shares their 
ideas. They have shown again and again that they 
prefer a tolerant and intelligent foreigner to rule over 
them rather than an obstinate and wrong-headed man 
of native origin. The earliest strong union of the 
various parts of England was achieved by William 
the Norman, a man of French and Scandinavian 
descent. Our native-born king, Charles the First, 
was put to death by his people ; his son, James the 
Second, was banished, and the Dutchman, William 
the Third, who had proved himself a statesman and 
soldier of genius in his opposition to Louis the Four- 
teenth, was elected to the throne of England. The 
fierce struggles of the seventeenth century, between 
Royalists and Parliamentarians, between Cavaliers and 
Puritans, were settled at last, not by the destruction 
of either party, but by the stereotj^ping of the dis- 
pute in the milder and more tolerable shape of the 
party system. The only people we have ever shown 
ourselves unwilling to tolerate are the people who 
will tolerate no one but their own kind. We hate 
all Acts of Uniformity with a deadly hatred. We are 
careful for the rights of minorities. We think life 

2i«a E 



66 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

should be made possible, and we do not object to its 
being made happy, for dissenters. Voltaire, the acutest 
French mind of his age, remarked on this when he 
visited England in 1726. ' England ', he says, ' is the 
country of sects. "In my father's house are many 
mansions". . . . Although the Episcopalians and the 
Presbyterians are the two dominant sects in Great 
Britain, all the others are welcomed there, and live 
together very fairly, whilst most of the preachers 
hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist 
damns a Jesuit. Enter the London Exchange, a place 
much more worthy of respect than most Courts, and 
you see assembled for the benefit of mankind repre- 
sentatives of all nations. There the Jew, the Moham- 
medan, and the Christian deal with each other as if they 
were of the same religion, and call infidels only those 
who become bankrupt. There the Presbyterian trusts 
the Anabaptist, and the Anabaptist relies on the 
promise of the Quaker. On leaving these free and 
peaceful assemblies, some proceed to the synagogue, 
others to the tavern. ... If in England there were 
only one religion, its despotism would be to be 
dreaded ; if there were only two, their followers would 
cut each other's throats ; but there are thirty of them, 
and they live in peace and happiness.' 

Since we have had so much practice in tolerating 
one another, and in living together even when our 
ideas on life and the conduct of life seem absolutely 
incompatible, it is no wonder that we approach the 
treatment of international affairs in a temper very 
unlike the solemn and dogmatic ferocity of the Ger- 
man. We do not expect or desire that other peoples 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 67 

shall resemble us. The world is wide ; and the world- 
drama is enriched by multiplicity and diversity of 
character. We like bad men, it* there is salt and spirit 
in their badness. We even admire a brute, if he is a 
whole-hearted brute. I have often tliought that if the 
Germans had been true to their principles and their 
programme — if, after proclaiming that they meant to 
win by sheer strength and that they recognized no 
other right, they had continued as they began, and 
had battered and hacked, burned and killed, without 
fear or pity, a certain reluctant admiration for them 
might have been felt in this country. There is no 
chance of that now, since they took to whining about 
humanity. Yet it is very difficult wholly to alienate 
the sympathies of the English people. It is perhaps in 
some ways a weakness, as it is certainly in other ways 
a strength, that we are fanciers of other peoples. Our 
soldiers have a tendency to make pets of their pri- 
soners, to cherish them a*s curiosities and souvenirs. 
The fancy becomes a passion when we find a little 
fellow struggling valiantly against odds. I suppose 
we should be at war with Germany to-day, even if 
the Germans had respected the neutrality of Belgium. 
But the unprovoked assault upon a little people that 
asked only to be let alone united all opinions in this 
country and brought us in with a rush. I believe 
there is one German, at least (I hope he is alive), who 
understands this. Early in July, 1914, a German 
student at Oxford, who was a friend an(i pupil of 
mine, came to say good-bye to me. I have since won- 
dered whether he was under orders to join his regi- 
ment. Anyhow, we talked very freely of many 

E 2 



68 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

things, and he told me of an adventure that had be- 
fallen him in an Oxford picture-palace. Portraits of 
notabilities were being thrown on the screen. When 
a portrait of the German Emperor appeared, a youth, 
sitting just behind my friend, shouted out an insulting 
and scurrilous remark. So my friend stood up and 
turned round and, catching him a cufF on the head, 
said, 'That's my emperor'. The house was full of 
undergraduates, and he expected to be seized and 
thrown into the street. To his great surprise the 
undergraduates, many of whom have now fallen on 
the fields of France, broke into rounds of cheering. 
* I should like to think ', my friend said, ' that a thing 
like that could possibly happen in a German city, but 
I am afraid that the feeling there would always be 
against the foreigner. I admire the English ; they 
are so just.' I have heard nothing of him since, 
except a rumour that he is with the German army of 
occupation in Belgium. If so^ I like to think of him 
at a regimental mess, suggesting doubts, or, if that is 
an impossible breach of military discipline, keeping 
silence, when the loud-voiced major explains that the 
sympathy of the English for Belgium is all pretence 
and cant. 

Ideal and disinterested motives are always to be 
reckoned with in human nature. What the Germans 
call ' real politics ', that is to say, politics which treat 
disinterested motives as negligible, have led them into 
a morass and have bogged them there. How easy it 
is to explain that the British Empire depends on trade, 
that we are a nation of traders, that all our policy 
is shaped by trade, that therefore it can only be 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 69 

hypocrisy in us to pretend to any of the finer feelings. 
This is not, as you might suppose, the harmless sally 
of a one-eyed wit ; it is the carefully reasoned belief 
of Germany's profoundest political thinkers. They 
do not understand a cavalier, so they confidently 
assert that there is no such thing in nature. That is 
a bad mistake to make about any nation, but perhaps 
worst when it is made about the English, for the 
cavalier temper in England runs through all classes. 
You can find it in the schoolmaster, the small trader, 
the clerk, and the labourer, as readily as in the officer 
of dragoons, or the Arctic explorer. The Roundheads 
won the Civil War, and bequeathed to us their 
political achievements. From the Cavaliers we have 
a more intimate bequest : it is from them, not from 
the Puritans, that the fighting forces of the British 
Empire inherit their outlook on the world, their 
freedom from pedantry, and that gaiety and lightness 
of courage which makes them carry their lives like 
a feather in the cap. 

I am not saying that our qualities, good or bad, 
commend us very readily to strangers. The people of 
England, on the whole, are respected more than they 
are liked. When I call them fanciers of other nations, 
I feel it only fair to add that some of those other 
nations express the same truth in diff*erent language. 
I have often heard the complaint made that English- 
men cannot speak of foreigners without an air of 
patronage. It is impossible to deny this charge, for, 
in a question of manners, the impressions you produce 
are your manners; and there is no doubt about this 
impression. There is a certain coldness about tlio 



70 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

upright and humane Englishman which repels and 
intimidates any trivial human being who approaches 
him. Most men would forgo their claim to justice 
for the chance of being liked. They would rather 
have their heads broken, or accept a bribe, than be 
the objects of a dispassionate judgement, however 
kindly. They feel this so strongly that they experi- 
ence a dull discomfort in any relationship that is not 
tinctured with passion. As there are many such 
relationships, not to be avoided even by the most 
emotional natures, they escape from them by simulat- 
ing livety feeling, and are sometimes exaggerated and 
insincere in manner. They issue a very large paper 
currency on a very small gold reserve. This, which 
is commonly known as the Irish Question, is an in- 
soluble problem, for it is a clash not of interests but 
of temperaments. The English, it must in faii-ness be 
admitted, do as they would be done by. No English- 
man pure and simple is incommoded by the coldness 
of strangers. He prefers it, for there are many stupid 
little businesses in the world, which are falsified when 
they are made much of; and even when important 
facts are to be told, he would rather have them told 
in a dreary manner. He hates a fuss. 

The Germans, who are a highly emotional and 
excitable people, have concentrated all their energy 
on a few simple ideas. Their moral outlook is as 
narrow as their geographical outlook is wide. Will 
their faith prevail by its intensity, narrow and false 
though it be ? I cannot prove that it will not, but 
I have a suspicion, which I think has already occurred 
to some of them, that the world is too large and wilful 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 71 

and strong to be mastered by them. We hav§ seen 
what their hatchets and explosives can do, and they 
are nearing the end of their resources. They can still 
repeat some of their old exploits, but they make no 
headway, and time is not their friend. 

One service, perhaps, they have done to civilization. 
There is a growing number of people who hold that 
when this War is over international relations must 
not be permitted to slip back into the unstable con- 
dition which tempted the Germans to their crime. 
A good many pacific theorists, no doubt, have not the 
experience and the imagination which would enable 
them to pass a useful judgement, or to make a valuable 
suggestion, on the affairs of nations. The abolition of 
war would be easily obtained if it were generally 
agreed that war is the worst thing that can befall 
a people. But this is not generally agreed; and, 
further, it is not true. While men are men they 
cannot be sure that they will never be challenged on 
a point of deep and intimate concern, where they 
would rather die than yield. But something can 
perhaps be done to discourage gamblers' wars, tliough 
even here any stockbroker will tell you how difficult 
it is to suppress gambling without injuring the spirit 
of enterprise. The only real check on war is an 
understanding between nations. For the strengthening 
of such an understanding the Allies have a great 
opportunity, and admirable instruments. I do not 
think that we shall call on Germany to preside at our 
conferences. But we shall have the help of all those 
qualities of heart and mind which are possessed by 
France, by Russia, by Italy, and by America, wlio. for 



72 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

all her caution, hates cruelty even more than she loves 
peace. There has never been an alliance of greater 
promise for the government and peace of the world. 

What is the contribution of the British Empire, and 
of England, towards this settlement? Many of our 
domestic problems, as I have said, bear a curious 
resemblance to international problems. We have not 
solved them all. We have had many stumblings and 
many backslidings. But we have shown again and 
again that we believe in toleration on the widest 
possible basis, and that we are capable of generosity, 
which is a virtue much more commonly shown by 
private persons than by communities. We abolished 
the slave trade. We granted self-government to South 
Africa just after our war with her. Only a few days 
ago we gave India her will, and allowed her to impose 
a duty on our manufactures. Ireland could have self- 
government to-morrow if she did not value her feuds 
more than anything else in the world. All these are 
peoples to whom we have been bound by ties of kin- 
ship or trusteeship. A wider and greater opportunity 
is on its way to us. We are to see whether we are 
capable of generosity and trust towards peoples who 
are neither our kin nor our wards. Our understanding 
with France and Russia will call for great goodwill on 
both sides, not so much in the drafting of formal 
treaties as in indulging one another in our national 
habits. Families who fail to live together in unity 
commonly fail not because they quarrel about large 
interests, but because they do not like each other's 
little ways. The French are not a dull people ; and 
the Russians are not a tedious people (what they do 



THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 73 

they do suddenly, without explanation) ; so that if we 
fail to take pleasure in them we have ourselves to 
blame. If we are not equal to our opportunities, if 
we do not learn to feel any affection for them, then 
not all the pacts and congresses in the world can make 
peace secure. 

Of Germany it is too early to speak. We have not 
yet defeated her. If we do defeat her, no one who 
is acquainted with our temper and our record believes 
that we shall impose cruel or vindictive terms. If it 
were only the engineers of this war who were in 
question, we would destroy them gladly as common 
pests. But the thing is not so easy. A single home 
is in many ways a greater and more appealing thing 
than a nation ; we should find ourselves thinking of 
the miseries of simple and ignorant people who have 
given their all for the country of their birth; and 
our hearts would fail us. 

The Germans would certainly despise this address 
of mine, for I have talked only of morality, while 
they talk and think chiefly of machines. Zeppelins 
are a sad disappointment ; but if any address on the 
War is being delivered to-night by a German professor, 
there can be no doubt that it deals with submarines, 
and treats them as the saviours of the Fatherland. 
Well, I know very little about submarines, but I notice 
that they have not had much success against ships of 
war. We are so easy-going that we expected to carry 
on our commerce in war very much as we did in 
peace. We have to change all that, and it will cost 
us not a little inconvenience, or even great hard- 
ships. But I cannot believe that a scheme of privy 



74 THE FAITH OF ENGLAND 

attacks on the traders of all nations, devised as a last 
resort, in lieu of naval victory, can be successful when 
it is no longer a surprise. And when I read history, 
I am strengthened in my belief that morality is 
all-important. I do not find that any war between 
great nations was ever won by a machine. The 
Trojan horse will be trotted out against me, but that 
w^as a municipal affair. Wars are won by the temper 
of a people. Serbia is not yet defeated. It is 
a frenzied and desperate quest that the Germans 
undertook when they began to seek for some me- 
chanical trick or dodge, some monstrous engine, which 
should enable the less resolved and more excited 
people to defeat the more resolved and less excited. 
If we are to be defeated, it must be by them, not 
by their bogey-men. We got their measure on the 
Somme, and we found that when their guns failed 
to protect them, many of them threw up their hands. 
These men will never be our masters until we deserve 
to be their slaves. 

So I am glad to be able to end on a note of 
agreement with the German military party. If they 
defeat us, it will be no more than we deserve. Till 
then, or till they throw up their hands, we shall fight 
them, and God will defend the right. 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

All Address to the Royal Colonicd Institute, 
February 13, 1918 

Our losses in this War continue to be enormous, and 
we are not yet near to the end. So it may seem absurd 
to speak of our gains, of gains that we have already 
achieved. But if you will look at the thing in a large 
light, I think you will see that it is not absurd. 

I do not speak of gains of territory, and prisoners, and 
booty. It is true that we have taken from the Germans 
about a million square miles of land in Africa, where 
land is cheap. We have taken more prisoners from 
them than they have taken from us, and we have whole 
parks of German artillery to set over against the battered 
and broken remnants of British field-guns which were 
exhibited in Berlin — a monument to the immortal valour 
of the little old Army. I am speaking rather of gains 
which cannot be counted as guns are counted, or 
measured as land is measured, but which are none the 
less real and important. 

The Germans have achieved certain great material 
gains in this War, and they are fighting now to hold 
them. If they fail to hold them, the Germany of the 
war-lords is ruined. She will have to give up all her 
bloated ambitions, to purge and live cleanly, and pain- 
fully to reconstruct her prosperity on a quieter and 
sounder basis. She will not do this until she is forced 
to it b}^ defeat. No doubt there are moderate and 
sensible men in Germany, as in other countries ; but in 



76 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

Germany they are without influence, and can do nothing. 
War is the national industr}^ of Prussia ; Prussia has 
knit together the several states of the larger Germany 
by means of war, and has promised them prosperity 
and power in the future, to be achieved by war. You 
know the Prussian doctrine of war. Every one now 
knows it. According to that doctrine it is a foolish thing 
for a nation to wait till it is attacked. It should care- 
fully calculate its own strength and the strength of its 
neighbours, and, when it is ready, it should attack them, 
on any pretext, suddenly, without warning, and should 
take from them money and land. When it has gained 
territory in this fashion, it should subject the population 
of the conquered territory to the strictest laws of military 
service, and so supply itself with an instrument for new 
and bolder aggression. This is not only the German 
doctrine ; it is the German practice. In this way and 
no other modern Germany has been built up. It is a 
huge new State, founded on force, cemented by fear, and 
financed on speculative gains to be derived from the 
great gamble of war. You may have noticed that the 
German people have not been called on, as yet, to pay 
any considerable sum in taxation towards the expenses 
of this war. Those expenses (that, at least, was the 
original idea) were to be borne wholly by the conquered 
enemy. There are hundreds of thousands of Germans 
to-day who firmly believe that their war-lords will 
return in triumph from the stricken field, bringing with 
them the spoils of war, and scattering a largess of peace 
and plenty. 

To us it seems a marvel that any people should accept 
such a doctrine, and should wilhngly give their lives and 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 77 

their fortunes to the work of carrying it out in practice ; 
but it is not so marvellous as it seems. The German 
peoples are brave and obedient, and so make good 
soldiers ; they are easily lured by the hope of profit ; 
they are naturally attracted by the spectacular and 
sentimental side of war ; above all, they are so curiously 
stupid that many of them do actually believe that they 
are a divinely chosen race, superior to the other races 
of the world. They are very carefully educated, and 
their education, which is ordered by the State, is part of 
the military machine. Their thinking is done for them 
by officials. It would require an extraordinary degree 
of courage and independence for a German youth to cut 
himself loose and begin thinking and judging for him- 
self. It must always be remembered, moreover, that 
their recent history seems to justify their creed. I will 
not go back to Frederick the Great, though the history of 
his wars is the Prussian handbook, which teaches all 
the characteristic Prussian methods of treachery and 
deceit. But consider only the last two German wars. 
How, in the face of these, can it be proved to any German 
that war is not the most profitable of adventures ? In 
1866 Prussia had war with Austria. The war lasted 
forty days, and Prussia had from five to six thousand 
soldiers killed in action. As a consequence of the war 
Prussia gained ^ much territory, and established her 
control over the states of greater Germany. In 1870 
she had war with France. Her total casualties in that 
war were approximately a hundred thousand, just 
about the same as our casualties in Gallipoli. From the 
war she gained, besides a great increase of strength at 
home, the rich provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, with all 



78 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

their mineral wealth, and an indemnity of two hundred 
million pounds, that is to say, four times the actual cost 
of the war in money. How then can it be maintained 
that war is not good business ? If you say so to any 
Prussian, he thinks you are talking like a child. 

Not only were these two wars rich in profit for the 
Germans, but they did not lose them much esteem. 
There was sympathy in this country for the union of the 
German peoples, just as there was sympathy, a few years 
earlier, for the union of the various states of Italy. 
There was not a little admiration for German efficiency 
and strength. So that Bismarck, who was an expert in 
all the uses of bullying, blackmail, and fraud, was 
accepted as a great European statesman. I have always 
believed, and I still believe , that Germany will have to 
pay a heavy price for Bismarck — all the heavier because 
the payment has been so long deferred. 

The present War, then, is in the direct line of succes- 
sion to these former wars ; it was planned by Germany, 
elaborately and deliberately planned, on a calculation of 
the profits to be derived from operations on a large scale. 

Well, as I said, we, as a people, do not believe in 
gambling in human misery to attain uncertain speculative 
gains. We hold that war can be justified only by a 
good cause, not by a lucky event. The German doctrine 
seems to us impious and wicked. Though we have 
defined our war aims in detail, and the Germans have 
not dared publicly to define theirs, our real and sufficient 
war aim is to break the monstrous and inhuman 
doctrine and practice of the enemy — to make their cal- 
culations miscarry. And observe, if their calculations 
miscarry, they have fought and suffered for nothing 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 79 

They entered into this War for profit, and in the 
conduct of the War, though they have made many 
mistakes, they have made none of those generous and 
magnanimous mistakes which redeem and beautify a 
losing cause. 

The essence of our cause, and its greatest strength, is 
that we are not fighting for profit. We are fighting for 
no privilege except the privilege of possessing our 
souls, of being ourselves— a privilege which we claim 
also for other weaker nations. The inestimable strength 
of that position is that if the odds are against us it does 
not matter. If you see a ruffian torturing a child, and 
interfere to prevent him, do you feel that your attempt 
was a wrong one because he knocks you down ? And 
if you succeed, what material profit is there in saving a 
child from torture ? We have sometimes fought in the 
past for doubtful causes and for wrong causes, but this 
time there is no mistake. Our cause is better than we 
deserve ; we embraced it by an act of faith, and it is 
only by continuing in that faith that we shall see it 
through. The little old Army, when they went to 
France in August 1914, did not ask what profits were 
likely to come their way. They knew that there were 
none, but they were willing to sacrifice themselves to 
save decency and humanity from being trampled in the 
mud. This was the Army that the Germans called a 
mercenary Army, and its epitaph has been written by 
a good poet : 

These, in the day when heaven was falling, 
The hour when earth's foundations flcdj 
Followed their mercenary calling, 
And took their wages, and arc dcad^ 



80 SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 

Their shoulders held the heavens suspended, 
They stood, and earth's foundations stay, 
What God abandoned these defended. 
And saved the sum of things for pay. 

We must follow their example, for we shall never 
get a better. We must not make too much of calcula- 
tion, especially when it deals with incalculable things. 
Nervous public critics, like Mr. H. G. Wells, are always 
calling out for more cleverness in our methods, for new 
and effective tricks, so that we may win the War. I 
would never disparage cleverness ; the more you can 
get of it, the better ; but it is useless unless it is in the 
service of something stronger and greater than itself, 
and that is character. Cleverness can grasp ; it is only 
character that can hold. The Duke of Wellington was not 
a clever man ; he was a man of simple and honourable 
mind, with an infinite capacity for patience, persistence, 
and endurance, so that neither imexpected reverses 
abroad nor a flood of idle criticism at home could shake 
him or change him. So he bore a chief part in laying 
low the last great tyranny that desolated Europe. 

None of our great wars was won by cleverness ; they 
were all won by resolution and perseverance. In all 
of them we were near to despair and did not despair. 
In all of them we won through to victory in the end. 

But in none of them did victory come in the expected 
shape. The worst of making elaborate plans of victory, 
and programmes of all that is to follow victory, is that 
the mixed event is sure to defeat those plans. Not 
every war finds its decision in a single great battle. 
Think of our war with Spain in the sixteenth century. 
Spain was then the greatest of European Powers. She 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 81 

had larger armies than we could raise ; she had more 
than our wealth, and more than our shipping. The 
newly discovered continent of America was an appanage 
of Spain, and her great galleons were wafted lazily to 
and fro, bringing her all the treasures of the western 
hemisphere. We defeated her by standing out and 
holding on. We fought her in the Low Countries, 
which she enslaved and oppressed. We refused to 
recognize her exclusive rights in America, and our 
merchant seamen kept the sea undaunted, as they have 
kept it for the last three years. When at last we 
became an intolerable vexation to Spain, she collected 
a great Armada, or war-fleet, to invade and destroy us ; 
and it was shattered, by the winds of heaven and the 
sailors of England, in 1588. The defeat of the Armada 
was the turning-point of the war, but it was not the 
end. It lifted a great shadow of fear from the hearts 
of the people, as a great shadow of fear has already 
been lifted from their hearts in the present War, but 
during the years that followed we suffered many and 
serious reverses at the hand of Spain, before peace and 
security were reached. So late as 1601, thirteen years 
after the defeat of the Armada, the King of Denmark 
offered to mediate between England and Spain, so that 
the long and disastrous war might be ended. Queen 
Elizabeth was then old and frail, but this was what she 
said— and if you want to understand why she was 
almost adored by her people, listen to her words : * I 
would have the King of Denmark, and all Princee 
Christian and Heathen to know, that En<i;land hath no 
need to crave peace ; nor myself (Midured one hour's 
fear since I attained the crown thereof, being guarded 

2161 ^ 



82 SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 

with so valiant and faithful subjects/ In the end the 
power and menace of Spain faded away, and when 
peace was made, in 1604, this nation never again, from 
that day to this, feared the worst that Spain could do. 

What were our gains from the war with Spain? 
Freedom to live our lives in our own way, unthreatened ; 
freedom to colonize America. The gains of a great war 
are never visible immediately ; they are deferred, and 
extended over many years. What did we gain by our 
war with Napoleon, which ended in the victory of 
Waterloo ? For long years after Waterloo this country 
was full of riots and discontents ; there were rick- 
burnings, agitations, popular risings, and something 
very near to famine in the land. But all these things, 
from a distance, are now seen to have been the broken 
water that follows the passage of a great storm. The 
real gains of Waterloo, and still more of Trafalgar, are 
evident in the enormous commercial and industrial 
development of England during the nineteenth century, 
and in the peaceful foundation of the great dominions of 
Canada, Australia, and South Africa, which was made 
possible only by our unchallenged use of the seas. The 
men who won those two great battles did not live to 
gather the fruits of their victory ; but their children 
did. If we defeat Germany as completely as we hope, 
we shall not be able to point at once to our gains. But 
.it is not a rash forecast to say that our children and 
children's children will live in greater security and 
freedom than we have ever tasted. 

A man must have a good and wide imagination if he 
is to be willing to face wounds and death for the sake 
of his unborn descendants and kinsfolk. We cannot 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 83 

count on the popular imagination being equal to the 
task. Fortunately, there is a substitute for imagination 
which does the work as well or better, and that is 
character. Our people are sound in instinct ; they 
understand a fight. They know that a wrestler who 
considers, while he is in the grip of his adversary, 
whether he would not do well to give over, and so put 
an end to the weariness and the strain, is no sort of 
a wrestler. They have never failed under a strai« of 
this kind, and they will not fail now. The people who 
do the half-hearted and timid talking are either young 
egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their 
personal ease and independence ; or elderly pensive 
gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no 
longer fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into 
melancholy ; or feverish journalists, who live on the 
proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the 
temperature of the War every morning, and then rush 
into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and 
fears ; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change 
from London to Berlin means nothing but a change in 
diet and a pleasant addition to their opportunities of 
hearing good music ; or aliens in heart, to whom the 
historic fame of England, 'dear for her reputation 
through the world,* is less than nothing ; or practical 
jokers, who are calm and confident enough themselves, 
but delight in startling and depressing others. These 
are not the people of England ; they are the parasites 
of the people of England. Tlie people of p]ngland 
understand a fight. 

That brings me to the first great gain of the War. 
We have found ourselves. Which of us, in the early 



84 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

months of 1914, would have dared to predict the 
splendours of the youth of this Empire — splendours 
which are now a part of our history ? We are adepts 
at self-criticism and self-depreciation. We hate the 
language of emotion. Some of us, if we were taken to 
heaven and asked what we thought of it, would say 
that it is decent, or not so bad, I suppose we are 
jealous to keep our standard high, and to have some- 
thing to say if a better place should be found. But in 
spite of all this, we do now know, and it is worth 
knowing, that we are not weaker than our fathers. 
We know that the people who inhabit these islands 
and this commonwealth of nations cannot be pushed on 
one side, or driven under_, or denied a great share in 
the future ordering of the Avorld. We know this, and 
our knowledge of it is the debt that we owe to oik dead. 
It is not vanity to admit that we know it; on the 
contrary, it would be vanity to pretend that we do not 
know it. It is visible to other eyes than ours. Some 
time ago I heard an address given by a friend of mine, 
an Indian Mohammedan of warrior descent, to University 
students of his own faith. He was urging on them the 
futility of dreams and the necessity of self- discipline 
and self-devotion. ' Why do the people of this country ', 
he said, ' count for so much all the world over ? It is 
not because of their dreams ; it is because thousands of 
them are lying at the bottom of the sea.' 

Further, we have not only found om-selves ; we have 
found one another. A new kindliness has grown up, 
during the War, between people divided by the barriers 
of class, or wealth, or circumstance. A statesman of 
the seventeenth century remarks that It is a MisfoHime 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 85 

for a Man not to have a Friend in the World, hut for 
that reason he shall have no Enemy. I might invert his 
maxim and say, It is a Misfortune for a Man to have 
many Enemies, hut for that reason he shall hioiv ivho 
are his Friends. No Kadical member of Parliament 
will again, while any of us live, cast contempt on ' the 
carpet Captains of Mayfair'. No idle Tory talker will 
again dare to say that the working men of England 
care nothing for their country. Even the manners of 
railway travel have improved. I was travelling in a 
third-class compartment of a crowded train the other 
day ; we were twenty in the compartment, but it seemed 
a pity to leave any one behind, and we made room for 
number twenty-one. Nothing but a very kindly human 
feeling could have packed us tight enough for this. Yet 
now is the time that has been chosen by some of these 
pensive gentlemen that I spoke of, and by some of these 
excitable journalists, to threaten us with class-war, and 
to try to make our flesh creep by conjuring up the horrors 
of revolution. I advise them to take their opinions to 
the third-class compartment and discuss them there. It 
is a good tribunal, for, sooner or later, you will find 
every one there — even officers, when they are travelling 
in mufti at their own expense. I have visited this 
tribmial very often, and I have always come away from 
it with the same impression, that this people means 
to win the War. But I do not travel nmch in the 
North of England, so I asked a friend of mine, whose 
dealings are with the industrial North, what the work- 
people of Lancashire and Yorkshire think of the War. 
He said, ' Their view is very simple : they mean to 
win it ; and they mean to make as mueli money out 



86 SOME GAINS OF THE Vf AK 

of it as ever they can/ Certainly, that is very simple ; 
but before you judge them, put yourselves in their 
place. There are great outcries against profiteers, for 
making exorbitant profits out of the War, and against 
munition workers, for delaying work in order to get 
higher wages. I do not defend either of them ; they 
are unimaginative and selfish, and I do not care how 
severely they are dealt witli ; but I do say that the 
majority of them are not wicked in intention. A good 
many of the more innocent profiteers are men whose sin 
is that they take an offer of two shillings rather than 
an offer of eighteenpence for what cost them one and a 
penny. Some of us, in our weaker moments, might be 
betrayed into doing the same. As for the munition 
workers, I remember what Goldsmith, who had known 
the bitterest poverty, wrote to his brother. ' Avarice ', he 
said, ' in the lower orders of mankind is true ambition ; 
avarice is the only ladder the poor can use to preferment. 
Preach then, my dear Sir, to your son, not the excellence 
of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but 
endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his 
poor wandering uncle's example be placed in his eyes. 
I had learned from books to love virtue before I was 
taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.' 

The profiteers and the munition workers are en- 
deavouring, incidentally, to better their own position. 
But make no mistake ; the bulk of these people would 
rather die than allow one spire of English grass to be 
trodden under the foot of a foreign trespasser. Their 
chief sin is that they do not fear. They think that there 
is plenty of time to do a little business for themselves 
on the way to defeat the enemy. I cannot help re- 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 87 

membering the mutiny at the Nore, which broke out 
in our fleet during the Napoleonic wars. The mutineers 
struck for more pay and better treatment, but they 
agreed together that if the French fleet should put ii^ an 
appearance during the mutiny, all their claims should 
be postponed for a time, and the French fleet should 
have their first attention. 

Employers and employed do, no doubt, find in some 
trades to-day that their relations are strained and irksome. 
They would do well to take a lesson from the Army, 
where, with very few exceptions, there is harmony and 
understanding between those who take orders and those 
who give them. It is only in the Army that you can 
see realized the ideal of ancient Rome. 

Then none was for a party. 

Then all were for the State ; 
Then the great man helped the poor. 

And the poor man loved the great. 

Why is the Army so far superior to most commercial 
and industrial businesses? The secret does not lie in 
State employment. There is plenty of discontent and 
unrest among the State-employed railway men and 
munition workers. It lies rather in the habit of mutual 
help and mutual trust. If any civilian employer of 
labour wants to have willing workpeople, let him take 
a hint from the Army. Let him live with his work- 
people, and share all their dangers and discomforts. 
Let him take thought for their welfare before his own, 
and teach self-sacrifice by example. Let him put the 
good of the nation before all private interests ; and those 
whom he commands will do for liim anything that he 
asks. 



88 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

I cannot believe that the benefits which have come to 
us from the Army will pass away with the passing of 
the War. Those who have been comrades in danger 
will surely take with them something of the old spirit 
into civil life. And those who have kept clear of the 
Army in order to carry on their own trades and 
businesses will surely realize that they have missed the 
great opportunity of their lives. 

In a wider sense the War has brought us to an 
understanding of one another. This great Common- 
wealth of independent nations which is called the 
British Empire is scattered over the surface of the 
habitable globe. It embraces people who live ten 
thousand miles apart, and whose ways of life are so 
different that they might seem to have nothing in 
common. But the War has brought them together, 
and has done more than half a century of peace could 
do to promote a common understanding. Hundreds 
of thousands of men of our blood who, before the War, 
had never seen this little island, have now made 
acquaintance with it. Hundreds of thousands of the 
inhabitants of this island to whom the Dominions were 
strange, far places, if, after the War, they should be 
called on to settle there, will not feel that they are 
leaving home. I can only hope that the Canadians 
and Anzacs think as well of us as we do of them. We 
do not like to praise our friends in their hearing, so I 
will say no more than this : I am told that a new kind 
of peerage, very haughty and very self-important, has 
arisen in South London. Its members are those house- 
holders who have been privileged to have Anzac 
soldiers billeted on them. It is private ties of this 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 89 

kind, invisible to the constitutional lawyer and the 
political historian, which make the fine meshes of the 
web of Empire. 

Because he knew that the strength of the whole 
texture depends on the strength of the fine meshes, 
Earl Grey, who died last year, will always be remem- 
bered in our history. Not many men have his oppor- 
tunity to make acquaintance with the domain that is 
their birthright, for he had administered a province of 
South Africa, and had been Governor-General of Canada. 
He rediscovered the glory of the Empire, as poets redis- 
cover the glory of common speech. ' He had breathed 
its air,' a friend of his says, /fished its rivers, walked in 
its valleys, stood on its mountains, met its people face 
to face. He had geen it in all the zones of the world. 
He knew what it meant to mankind. Under the 
British flag, wherever he journeyed, he found men of 
English speech living in an atmosphere of liberty and 
carrying on the dear domestic traditions of the British 
Isles. He saw justice firmly planted there, industry and 
invention hard at work unfettered by tyrants of any 
kind, domestic life prospering in natural conditions, and 
our old English kindness and cheerfulness and broad- 
minded tolerance keeping things together. But he 
also saw room under that same flag, ample room, for 
millions and millions more of the human race. The 
Empire wasn't a word to him. It was a vast, an almost 
boundless, home for honest men.' 

The War did not dishearten him. When he died, 
in August, 1917, he said, ' Here I lie on my death-bed, 
looking clear into the Promised Land. I'm not allowed 
to enter it, but there it is before my eyes. After the 



90 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

War the people of this country will enter it, and those 
who laughed at me for a dreamer will see that I wasn't so 
wrong after all. But there 's still work to do for those 
who didn't laugh, hard work, and with much opposition 
in the way ; all the same, it is work right up against 
the goal. My dreams have come true.' 

One of the clear gains of the War is to be found in 
the increased activity and alertness of our own people. 
The motto of to-day is, * Let those now work who 
never worked before, And those who always worked 
now work the more.' Before the War we had a great 
national reputation for idleness — in this island, at least. 
I remember a friendly critic from Canada who, some 
five or six years ago, expressed to me, with much 
disquiet, his opinion that there was something very far 
wrong with the old country ; that we had gone soft. 
As for our German critics, they expressed the same 
view in gross and unmistakable fashion. Wit is not 
a native product in Germany, it all has to be imported, 
so they could not satirize us ; but their caricatures of 
the typical Englishman showed us what they thought. 
He was a young weakling with a foolish face, and was 
dressed in cricketing flannels. It would have been 
worth their while to notice what they did not notice, 
that his muscles and nerves are not soft. They learned 
that later, when the bank-clerks of Manchester broke the 
Prussian Guard into fragments at Contalmaison. This 
must have been a sad surprise, for the Germans had 
always taught, in their delightful authoritative fashion, 
that the chief industries of the young Englishman are 
lawn-tennis and afternoon tea. They are a fussy people, 
and they find it difficult to understand the calm of the 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 91 

man who, having nothing to do, does it. Perhaps they 
were right, and we were too idle. The disease was 
never so serious as they thought it, and now, thanks to 
them, we are in a fair way to recovery. The idle classes 
have turned their hand to the lathe and the plough. 
Women are doing a hundred things that they never did 
before, and are doing them well. The elasticity and 
resourcefulness that the War has developed will not be 
lost or destroyed by the coming of peace. Least of all 
will those qualities be lost if we should prove unable, 
in this War, to impose our own terms on Germany. 
Then the peace that follows will be a long struggle, and 
in that struggle we shall prevail. In the last long 
peace we were not suspicious ; we felt friendly enough 
to the Germans, and we gave them every advantage. 
They despised us for our friendliness and used the peace 
to prepare our downfall. That will never happen again. 
If we cannot tame the cunning animal that has assaulted 
humanity, at least we can and will tether him. Laws 
will not be necessary ; there are millions of others 
besides the seamen of England who will have no 
dealings with an unsubdued and unrepentant Germany. 
What the Germans are not taught by the War they 
will have to learn in the more tedious and no less costly 
school of peace. 

In any case, whether we win through to real peace 
and real security, or whether we are thrown back on an 
armed peace and the duty of unbroken vigilance, we 
shall be dependent for our future on the children 
who are now learning in the schools or playing in 
the streets. It is a good dependence. The children 
of to-day are better than the children whom I knew 



92 SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 

when I was a child. I think they have more inteUigence 
and sympathy ; they certainly have more pubhc spirit. 
We cannot do too much for them. The most that we 
can do is nothing to what they are going to do for us, 
for their own nation and people. I am not concerned 
to discuss the education problem. Formal education, 
carried on chiefly by means of books, is a very small 
part of the makmg of a man or a woman. But I am 
interested to know what the children are thinking. You 
cannot fathom a child's thoughts, but we know who are 
their best teachers, and what lessons have been stamped 
indelibly on their minds. Their teachers, whom they 
never saw, and whose lessons they will never forget, lie 
in graves in Flanders and France and Gallipoli and 
Syria and Mesopotamia, or unburied at the bottom of 
the sea. The runner falls, but the torch is carried 
forward. This is what Julian Grenfell, who gave his 
mind and his life to the War, has said in his splendid 
poem called Into Battle : 

And life is colour and warmth and light, 
And a striving evermore for these ; 
And he is dead who will not fight, 
And who dies fighting hath increase. 

Those who died fighting will have such increase that a 
whole new generation, better even than the old, will be 
ready, no long time hence, to uphold and extend and 
decorate the Commonwealth of nations which their 
fathers and brothers saved from ruin. 

One thing I have never heard discussed, but it is the 
clearest gain of all, and already it may be called a 
certain gain. After the War the English language will 
have such a position as it has never had before. It will 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 93 

be established in world-wide security. Even before the 
War, it may be truly said, our language was in no 
danger from the competition of the German language. 
The Germans have never had much success in the attempt 
to get their language adopted by other peoples. Not 
all the military laws of Prussia can drive out French 
from the hearts and homes of the people of Alsace. In 
the ports of the near and far East you will hear English 
spoken — pidgin English, as it is called, that is to say, a 
selection of English words suited for the business of 
daily life. But you may roam the world over, and you 
will hear no pidgin German. Before the War many 
Germans learned English, while very few English- 
speaking people learned German. In other matters we 
disagreed, but we both knew which way the wind was 
blowing. It may be said, and said truly, that our well- 
known laziness was one cause of our failing or neglect- 
ing to learn German. But it was not the only cause ; 
and we are not lazy in tasks which we believe to be 
worth our while. Rather we had an instinctive belief 
that the future does not belong to the German tongue. 
That belief is not likely to be impaired by the War, 
Armed ruffians can do some things, but one thing they 
cannot do ; they cannot endear their language to those 
who have suffered from their violence. The Germans 
poisoned the wells in South- West Africa ; in Europe 
they did all they could to poison the wells of mutual 
trust and mutual understanding among civilized men. 
Do they think that these things will make a good 
advertisement for the explosive guttural sounds and 
the huddled deformed syntax of the speech in which 
they express their arrogance and their hate? Which 



94 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

of the chief European languages will come first, after 
the War, with the little nations? Will Serbia be 
content to speak German ? Will Norway and Denmark 
feel a new affection for the speech of the men who have 
degraded the old humanity of the seas ? Neighbourhood, 
kinship, and the necessities of commerce may retain for 
the German language a certain measure of custom in 
Sweden and Switzerland, and in Holland. But for the 
most part Germans T\dll have to be content to be 
addressed in their own tongue only by those who fear 
them, or by those who hope to cheat them. 

This gain, which I make bold to predict for the 
English language, is a real gain, apart from all patriotic 
bias. The English language is incomparably richer, 
more fluid, and more vital than the German language. 
Where the German has but one way of saying a thing, 
we have two or three, each with its distinctions and its 
subtleties of usage. Our capital wealth is greater, and 
so are our powers of borrowing. EngHsh sprang from 
the old Teutonic stock, and we can still coin new words, 
such as ' food-hoard ' and ' joy-ride ', in the German 
fashion. But long centuries ago we added thousands 
of Romance words, words which came into English 
through the French or Norman-French, and brought 
with them the ideas of Latin civilization and of medi- 
aeval Christianity. Later on, when the renewed study 
of Latin and Greek quickened the intellectual life of 
Europe, we imported thousands of Greek and Latin 
words direct from the ancient world, learned words, 
many of them, suitable for philosophers, or for writers 
who pride themselves on shooting a little above the 
vulgar apprehension. Yet many of these, too, have 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 95 

found their way into daily speech, so that we can say 
most things in three ways, according as we draw on one 
or another of the three main sources of our speech. 
Thus, you can Begin, or Commence, or Initiate an 
undertaking, with Boldness, or Courage, or Resolution. 
If you are a Workman, or Labourer, or Operative, you 
can Ask, or Request, or Solicit your emplo3^er to Yield, 
or Grant, or Concede, an increase in the Earnings, or 
Wages, or Remuneration which fall to the lot of your 
Fellow, or Companion, or Associate. Your employer 
is perhaps Old, or Veteran, or Superannuated, which 
may Hinder, or Delay, or Retard the success of 3^our ap- 
plication. But if you Foretell, or Prophesy, or Predict 
that the War will have an End, or Close, or Termination 
that shall not only be Speedy, or Rapid, or Accelerated, 
but also Great, or Grand, or Magnificent, you may perhaps 
Stir, or Move, or Actuate him to have Ruth, or Pity, or 
Compassion on your Mate, or Colleague, or Collaborator. 
The English language, then, is a language of great 
wealth — much greater wealth than can be illustrated by 
any brief example. But wealth is nothing unless you 
can use it. The real strength of English lies in the 
inspired freedom and variety of its syntax. There is no 
grammar of the English speech which is not comic in 
its stiffness and inadequacy. An English grammar does 
not explain all that we can do with our speech ; it 
merely explains what shackles and restraints we must 
put upon our speech if we would bring it within tho 
comprehension of a school-bred grammarian. But the 
speech itself is like the sea, and soon breaks down tho 
dykes built l)y the inland engineer. It was the fas^liion, in 
the eighteenth century, to speak of the divine Shakespeare. 



96 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

The reach and catholicity of his imagination was what 
earned him that extravagant praise ; but his syntax has no 
less title to be called divine. It is not cast or wrought, like 
metal ; it leaps like fire, and moves like air. So is every 
one that is born of the spirit. Our speech is our great 
charter. Far better than in the long constitutional 
process whereby we subjected our kings to law, and 
gave dignity and strength to our Commons, the meaning 
of English freedom is to be seen in the illimitable free- 
dom of our English speech. 

Our literature is almost as rich as our language. 
Modern German literature begins in the eighteenth 
century. Modern English literature began with Chaucer, 
in the fourteenth century, and has been full of great 
names and great books ever since. Nothing has been 
done in German literature for which we have not a 
counterpart, done as well or better — except the work 
of Heine, and Heine was a Jew. His opinion of the 
Prussians was that they are a compost of beer, deceit, 
and sand. French literature and English literature can 
be compared, throughout their long course, sometimes 
to the great advantage of the French. German litera- 
ture cannot seriously be compared with either. 

It may be objected that literature and art are orna- 
mental affairs, which count for little in the deadly strife 
of nations. But that is not so. Our language cannot 
go an3nvhere without taking our ideas and our creed 
with it, not to mention our institutions and our games. 
If the Germans could understand what Chaucer means 
when he says of his Knight that 

he loved chivalry, 
Truth and honour, freedom and courtesy, 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 97 

then indeed we might be near to an understanding. I 
asked a good German scholar the other day what is the 
German word for ' fair play '. He replied, as they do 
in Parliament, that he must ask for notice of that 
question. I fear there is no German word for ' fair play ', 

The little countries, the pawns and victims of German 
policy, understand our ideas better. The peoples who 
have suffered from tyranny and oppression look to 
England for help, and it is a generous weakness in us 
that we sometimes deceive them by our sympathy, for 
our power is limited, and we cannot help them all. But 
it -svill not count against us at the final reckoning that 
in most places where humanity has suffered cruelty and 
indignity the name of England has been invoked : not 
always in vain. 

And now, for I have kept to the last what I beheve 
to be the greatest gain of all, the entry of America into 
the War assures the triumph of our common language. 
America is peopled by many races ; only a minority of 
the inhabitants — an influential and governing minority — 
are of the English stock. But here, again, the language 
carries it ; and the ideas that inspire America are ideas 
which had their origin in the long English struggle for 
freedom^ Our sufferings in this War are great, but 
they are not so great that we cannot recognize virtue in 
a new recruit to the cause. No nation, in the whole 
course of human history, has ever made a more splendid 
decision, or performed a more magnanimous act, than 
America, when she decided to enter this War. She 
had nothing to gain, for, to say the bare tiTith, she had 
little to lose. If Germany were to dominate the world, 
America, no doubt, would be ruined ; but in all human 

2168 ^ 



98 SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 

likelihood, Germany's impious attempt would have spent 
itself and been broken long before it reached the coasts 
of America. America might have stood out of the 
War in the assurance that her own interests were safe, 
and that) when the tempest had passed, the centre of 
civilization would be transferred from a broken and 
exhausted Europe to a peaceful and prosperous America. 
Some few Americans talked in this strain, and favoured 
a decision in this sense. But it was not for nothing 
that America was founded upon religion. When she 
saw humanity in anguish, she did not pass by on the 
other side. Her entry into the War has put an end, I 
hope for ever, to the family quarrel, not very profound 
or significant, which for a century and a half has been 
a jarring note in the relations of mother and daughter. 
And it has put an end to another danger. It seemed 
at one time not unlikely that the English language as it 
is spoken overseas would set up a life of its own, and 
become separated from the language of the old country. 
A development of this kind would be natural enough. 
The Boers of South Africa speak Dutch, but not the 
Dutch spoken in Holland. The French Canadians 
speak French, but not the French of Moliere. Half 
a century ago, when America was exploring and settling 
her own coimtry, in wild and lone places, her pioneers 
enriched the English speech with all kinds of new and 
vivid phrases. The tendency was then for America to go 
her own way, and to cultivate what is new in language 
at the expense of what is old. She prided herself even 
on having a spelling of her own, and seemed almost 
willing to break loose from tradition and to coin a new 
American English. 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 99 

This has not happened ; and now, I think, it will not 
happen. For one thing, the American colonists left us 
when already we had a great literature. Chaucer, 
Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no less 
than to us, and America has never forgotten them. 
The education which has been fostered in American 
schools and colleges keeps the whole nation in touch 
with the past. Some of their best authors write in a 
style that Milton and Burke would understand and 
approve. There is no more beautiful English prose 
than Nathaniel Hawthorne's. The best speeches of 
Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President 
Wilson, are merely classic English. During my own 
lifetime I am sure I have seen the speech usages of the 
two peoples draw closer together. For one thing, we 
on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the 
more picturesque colloquialisms of America. On in- 
formal occasions I sometimes brighten my own speech 
with phrases which I think I owe to one of the best of 
living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, 
the author of Fables in Slang. The press, the tele- 
graph, the telephone, and the growing habit of travel 
bind us closer together every year; and the English 
that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is 
going to remain one and the same English, om- common 
inheritance. 

One question, the most important and difficult of all, 
remains to be asked. Will this War, in its course and 
in its effects, tend to prevent or discourage later wars ? 
If the gains that it brings prove to be merely partial 
and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustly 
depressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal 

g2 



100 SOME GAINS OF THE WAE 

cruelty, then nothing can be more certain than that the 
peace of the world is farther oE than ever. When she 
was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, 
said that patriotism is not enough. Every one who 
thinks on international affairs knows this; almost 
every one forgets it in time of war. What can be done 
to prevent nations from appealing to the wild justice of 
revenge? 

A League of Nations may do good, but I am surprised 
that any one who has imagination and a knovdedge of 
the facts should entertain high hopes of it as a full 
solution. There is a League of Nations to-day which 
has given a verdict against the Central Powers, and 
that verdict is being enforced by the most terrible War 
in all human history. If the verdict had been given 
before the War began, it may be said, then Germany 
might have accepted it, and reframed. So she might, 
but what then ? She would have felt herself wronged ; 
she would have deferred the War, and, in ways that she 
knows so well, would have set about making a party for 
herself among the nations of the League. Who can be 
confident that she would have failed either to divide her 
judges, or to accumulate such elements of strength that 
she might dare to defy them? A League of Nations 
would work well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted 
by all the nations composing it. To make majority-rule 
possible you must have a community made up of mem- 
bers who are reasonably well informed upon one another's 
affairs, and who are bound together by a tie of loyalty 
stronger and more enduring than their causes of differ- 
ence. It would be a hap]3y thing if the nations of the 
world made such a community ; and the sufferings of 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 101 

this War have brought them nearer to desiring it. But 
those who believe that such a community can be formed 
to-day or to-morrow are too sanguine. It must not be 
forgotten that the very principle of the League, if its 
judgements are to take effect, involves a world-war in 
cases where a strong minority resists those judgements. 
Every war would become a world-war. Perhaps this 
very fact would prevent wars, but it cannot be said that 
experience favours such a conclusion. 

There is no escape for us by way of the Gospels. The 
Gospel precept to turn the other cheek to the aggressor 
was not addressed to a meeting of trustees. Christianity 
has never shirked war, or even much disliked it. Where 
the whole soul is set on things unseen, wounds and death 
become of less account. And if the Christians have not 
helped us to avoid war, how should the pacifists be of 
use ? Those of them whom I happen to know, or to have 
met, have shown themselves, in the relations of civil life, 
to be irritable, self-willed, combative creatures, where the 
average soldier is calm, unselfish, and placable. There 
is something incongruous and absurd in the pacifist of 
British descent. He has fighting in his blood, and 
when his creed, or liis nervous sensibility to physical 
horrors, denies him the use of fighting, his blood turns 
sour. He can argue, and object, and criticize, but he 
cannot lead. All that he can offer us in effect is eterrial 
quarrels in place of occasional fights. 

No one can do anything to prevent war who does 
not recognize its splendour, for it is by its splendour 
that it keeps its hold on humanity, and persists. The 
^vickedest and most selfish war in the Avorld is not 
fought by wicked and selfish soldiers. The spirit of 



102 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

man is immense, and for an old memory, a pledged word, 
a sense of fellowship, offers this frail and complicated 
tissue of flesh and blood, which a pin or a grain of sand 
will disorder, to be the victim of all the atrocities that 
the wit of man can compound out of fire and steel and 
poison. If that spirit is to be changed, or directed into 
new courses, it must be by one who understands it, and 
approaches it reverently, with bared head. 

The best hope seems to me to lie in paying chief 
attention to the improvement of war rather than to its 
abolition ; to the decencies of the craft ; to the style 
rather than the matter. Style is often more important 
than matter, and this War would not have been so fierce 
or so prolonged if it had not become largely a war on 
a point of style, a war, that is to say, to determine the 
question how war should be waged. If the Germans 
had behaved humanely and considerately to the civil 
population of Belgium, if they had kept their solemn 
promise not to use poison-gas, if they had refrained from 
mmrder at sea, if their valour had been accompanied 
by chivalry, the War might now have been ended, 
perhaps not in their disfavour, for it would not have 
^ been felt, as it now is felt, that they must be defeated 
at no matter how great a cost, or civilization will 
perish. 

Even as things are, there have been some gains in 
the manner of conducting war, which, when futm^e 
generations look back on them, will be seen to be con- 
siderable. It is true that modern science has devised 
new and appalling weapons. The invention of a new 
weapon in war always arouses protest, but it does not 
usually, in the long run, make war more inhuman. 



SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 103 

There was a great outcry in Europe when the broad- 
sword was superseded by the rapier, and a tall man of 
his hands could be spitted hke a cat or a rabbit by any 
dexterous little fellow with a trained wrist. There was 
a wave of indignation, which was a hundred years in 
passing, when musketry first came into use, and a man- 
at-arms of great prowess could be killed from behind a 
wall by one who would not have dared to meet him in 
open combat. But these changes did not, in effect, make 
war crueller or more deadly. They gave more play to 
intelligence, and abolished the tyranny of the bully, 
who took the wall of every man he met, and made him- 
self a public nuisance. The introduction of poison-gas, 
which is a small thing compared with the invention of 
fire-arms, has given the chemist a place in the ranks of 
fighting-men. And if science has lent its aid to the 
destruction of life, it has spent greater zeal and more 
prolonged effort on the saving of life. No previous 
war will compare with this in care for the wounded 
and maimed. In all countries, and on all fronts, an 
army of skilled workers devote themselves to this single 
end. I believe that this quickening of the human con- 
science, for that is what it is, \\all prove to be the greatest 
gain of the War, and the greatest advance made in 
restraint of war. If the nations come to recognize that 
their first duty, and their first responsibility, is to those 
who give so much in their service, that recognition will 
of itself do more than can be done by any conclave 
of statesmen to discourage war. It was the monk 
Telemachus, according to the old story, who stopped the 
gladiatorial games at Eome, and was stoned by the 
people. If war, in process of time, shall be abolished, 



104 SOME GAINS OF THE WAR 

or, failing that, shall be governed by the codes of 
humanity and chivalry, like a decent tournament ; then 
the one sacrificial figure which v^ill everywhere be 
honoured for the change will be the figure not of a 
priest or a politician, but of a hospital nurse. 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

A paper read to the Essay Society j Eton College^ 
March 14, 1918. 

When you asked me to read or speak to you, 
I promised to speak about the War. What I have 
to say is wholly orthodox, but it is none the worse 
for that. Indeed, when I think how entirely the War 
possesses our thoughts and how entirely we are agreed 
concerning it, I seem to see a new meaning in the 
creeds of the religions. These creeds grew up by 
general consent, and no one who believed them grudged 
repeating them. In the face of an indifferent or hostile 
world the faithful found themselves obliged to define 
their belief, and to strengthen themselves by an un- 
wearying and united profession of faith. It is the 
enemy who gives meaning to a religious creed : with- 
out our creed we cannot win. So I am willing to 
remind you of what you know, rather than to try to 
introduce you to novelties. 

The strength of the enemy lies in his creed ; not in 
the lands that he has ravished from his neighbours. 
If his creed does not prevail, his lands will not help 
him. Germany has taken lands from Belgium, Serbia, 
Roumania, Russia, and the rest, but unless her diges- 
tion is as strong as her appetite, she will fail to keep 
them. If she is to hold them in peace, the peoples 



106 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

who inhabit these lands must be either exterminated 
or converted to the German creed. Lands can be 
annexed by a successful campaign ; they can be perma- 
nently conquered only by the operations of peace. The 
people who survive will be a weakness to the German 
Empire unless they accept what they are oflered, 
a share in the German creed. 

That creed has not many natural attractions for the 
peoples on whom it is imposed by force. It is an 
intensely patriotic creed ; it insists on racial supremacy, 
and on unity to be achieved by violence. Pleading 
and persuasion have little part in it except as instru- 
ments of deceit. There is no use in listening to 
what the Germans say ; they do not believe it them- 
selves. What they say is for others ; what they do is 
for themselves. While they are at war, language for 
them has only two uses — to conceal their thoughts, 
and to deceive their enemies. 

The creed of Western civilization, for which they 
feel nothing but contempt, and on which they will be 
broken, is not a simple thing, like theirs. The words 
by which it is commonly expressed — democracy, parlia- 
mentarism, individual liberty, diversity, free develop- 
ment — are puzzling theoretic words, which make no 
instinctive appeal to the heart. Nevertheless, we stand 
for growth as against order; and for life as against 
death. If Germany wins this war, her system will 
have to be broken or to decay before growth can 
start again. Must we lose even a hundred years in 
shaking ourselves free from the paralysis of the 
German nightmare ? 

The Germans have shown themselves strong in their 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 107 

unity, and strong in their willingness to make great 
sacrifices to preserve that unity. No one can deny 
nobility to the sacrifice made by the simple-minded 
German soldier who dies fighting bravely for his 
people and his creed. His narrowness is his strength, 
and makes unselfishness easier by saving his mind 
from question. ' This one thing you shall do ', his 
country says to him, ' fight and die for your country, 
so that your country and your people shall have lord- 
ship over other countries and other peoples. You are 
nothing ; Germany is everything.' 

We who live in this island love our country with at 
least as deep a passion ; but a creed so simple as the 
German creed v^^ill never do for us. We are patriotic, 
but our patriotism is often overlaid and confused by 
a wider thought and a wider sympathy than the 
Germans have ever known. Much extravagant praise 
has lately been given to the German power of thinking, 
which produces the elaborate marvels of German 
organization. But this thinking is slave-thinking, 
not master- thinking ; it spends itself wholly on 
devising complicated means to achieve a very simple 
end. That is what makes the Germans so like the 
animals. Their wisdom is all cunninof. I have had 
German friends, two or three, in the course of my life, 
but none of them ever understood a word that I said 
if I tried to say what I thought. You could talk to 
them about food, and they responded easily. It was 
all very restful and pleasant, like talking to an 
intelligent dog. 

If each of the allied nations were devoted to the 
creed of nationalism, the alliance could not endure. 



108 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

We depend for our strength on what we hold in 
common. The weakness of this wider creed is that it 
makes no such immediate and strong appeal to the 
natural instincts as is made by the mother-country. 
It demands the habitual exercise of reason and 
imagination. Further, seeing that we are infinitely 
less tame and less docile than the Germans, we depend 
for our strength on informing and convincing our 
people, and on obtaining agreement among them. 
Questions which in Germany are discussed only in 
the gloomy Berlin head-quarters of the General Staff 
are discussed here in the newspapers. In the press, 
even under the censorship, we think aloud. It records 
our differences and debates our policy. You could 
not suppress these differences and these debates with- 
out damaging our cause. There is no freedom worth 
having which does not, sooner or later, include the 
freedom to say what you think. 

No doubt we could, if necessary, carry on for a time 
without the press ; and I agree with those newspaper 
writers who have been saying recently that the 
importance of the press is monstrously exaggerated 
by some of its critics. The working-man, so far as 
I know him, does not depend for his patriotism on the 
leader-writers of the newspapers. He takes even the 
news with a very large grain of salt. ' So the papers 
say', he remarks; 'it may be true or it may not.' 
Yet the press has done good service, and might do 
better, in putting the meaning of the War before our 
people and in holding them together. Freedom means 
that we must love our diversity well enough to be 
willing to unite to protect it. We must die for our 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 109 

differences as cheerfully as the Germans die for their 
pattern. Or, if we can sketch a design of our cause, 
we must be as passionate in defence of that large 
vague design as the Germans are passionate in defence 
of their tight uniformity and their drill. If we were 
to fail to keep together, our cause, I believe, would 
still prevail, but at a cost that we dare not contem- 
plate, by way of anarchy, and the dissolution of 
societies, by long tortures, and tears, and martyrdoms. 
If we refuse to die in the ranks against the German 
tyranny we can keep our faith by dying at the stake. 
There are those who think martyrdom the better way ; 
and certainly that was how Christianity prevailed in 
Europe ; you can read the story in Caxton's transla- 
tion of the Golden Legend. But these saints and 
martyrs were making a beginning; we are fighting 
to keep what we have won, and it would be a huge 
failure on our part if we could keep nothing of it. but 
had to begin all over again. 

The business of the press, then, at this present 
crisis, is to keep the cause for which we are fighting 
clearly before us, and this it has done well; also, 
because we do not fight best in blinders, to tell us all 
that can be known of the facts of the situation, and 
this it has done not so well. 

The power of the newspapers is that most people 
read them, and that many people read nothing else. 
Their weakness is that they have to sell or cease to 
be, so that by a natural instinct of self-preservation 
they fall back on the two sure methods whereby you 
can always capture the attention of the public. Any 
man who is trying to say what lie thinks, making full 



110 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

allowance for all doubts and differences, runs the risk 
of losing his audience. He can regain their attention 
by flattering them or by frightening them. Flattery 
and fright, the one following the other from day to 
day, and often from paragraph to paragraph, is a very 
large part of the newspaper reader's diet. If he is 
a sane and busy man, he is not too much impressed by 
either. He is not mercurial enough for the quick 
changes of an orator's or journalist's fancy, whereby 
he is called on, one day, to dig the German warships 
like rats out of their harbour, and, not many days 
later, to spend his last shilling on the purchase of the 
last bullet to shoot at the German invader. He 
knows that this is such stuff as dreams are made of. 
He knows also that the orator or journalist, after 
calling on him for these achievements, goes home to 
dinner. No great harm is done, just as no great harm 
is done by bad novels. But an opportunity is lost; 
the press and the platform might do more than they 
do to strengthen us and inform us, and help forward 
our cause. 

I name the press and the platform together because 
they are essentially the same thing. Journalism is 
a kind of talk. The press, it is fair to say, is our- 
selves ; and every people, it may truly be said, has the 
press that it deserves. But reading is a thing that 
we do chiefly for indulgence and pleasure in our idle 
time ; and the press falls in with our mood, and 
supplies us with what we want in our weaker and 
lazier moments. No responsible man, with an eager 
and active mind, spends much of his time on the news- 
papers. Those who are excited to action by what 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 111 

they read in the papers are mostly content with the 
mild exercise of writing to these same papers to 
explain that some one else ought to do something 
and to do it at once. Their excitement worries them- 
selves more than it hurts others. When the devil, 
with horns and hooves, appeared to Cuvier, the 
naturalist, and threatened to devour him, Cuvier, who 
was asleep at the time, opened his eyes and looked at 
the terrible apparition. ' Hm,' he said, ' cloven-footed ; 
graminivorous; needn't be afraid of you;' and he 
went to sleep again. A man who says that he has 
not time to read the morning papers carefully is 
commonly a man who counts ; he knows what he 
has to do, and he goes on doing it. So far as I have 
observed, the cadets who are training for command in 
the army take very little interest in the exhortations 
of the newspapers. They even prefer the miserable 
trickle which is all that is left of football news. 

One of the chief problems connected with the press 
is therefore this — how can it be prevented from pro- 
ducing hysteria in the feeble-minded ? In time of 
war the censorship no doubt does something to pre- 
vent this ; and I think it might do more. ' Scare- 
lines ', as they are called — that is, sensational headings 
in large capital letters — might be reduced by law to 
modest dimensions. More important, the censorship 
might ^ insist that all who write shall sign their 
names to their articles. Why should journalists 
alone be relieved of responsibility to their country ? 
Is it possible that the Government is afraid of the 
press ? There is no need for fear. * Beware of Aris- 
tophanes ', says Landor, ' he can cast your name as 



112 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

a byword to a thousand cities of Asia for a thousand 
years.' But all that the press can do by its disfavour 
is to keep your name obscure in a hundred cities of 
England for a hundred days. Signed articles are 
robbed of their vague impressiveness, and are known 
for what they are — the opinions of one man. I would 
also recommend that a photograph of the author be 
placed at the head of every article. I have been 
saved from many bad novels by the helpful pictorial 
advertisements of modern publishers. 

The real work of the Press, as I said, is to help to 
hold the people together. Nothing else that it can do 
is of any importance compared with this. We are at 
one in this War as we have never been at one before 
within living memory, as we were not at one against 
Napoleon or against Louis XIV. Our trial is on us; 
and if we cannot preserve our oneness, we fail. What 
would be left to us I do not know ; but I am sure that 
an England which had accepted conditions of peace at 
Germany's hands would not be the England that any 
of us know. There might still be a few Englishmen, 
but they would have to look about for somewhere to 
live. Serbia would be a good place ; it has made no 
peace-treaty with Germany. 

We are profoundly at one ; and are divided only by 
illusions, which the press, in times past, has done 
much to keep alive. One of these illusions is the 
illusion of party. I have never been behind the 
scenes, among the creaking machinery, but * my 
impression, as a spectator, is that parties in England 
are made very much as you pick up sides for a game. 
I have observed that they are all conservative. The 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 113 

affections are conservative ; every one has a liking for 
his old habits and his old associates. There is some- 
thing comic in a well-nourished rich man who believes 
that he is a bold reformer and a destructive thinker. 
For real clotted reactionary sentiment I know nothing 
to match the table-talk of any aged parliamentary 
Radical. When we get a Labour Government, it will 
be patriotic, prejudiced, opposed to all innovation, 
superstitiously reverential of the past, sticky and, 
probably, tyrannical. 

The party illusion has been much weakened by the 
War, and those who still repeat the old catch- words 
are very near to lunacy. There is a deeper and more 
dangerous illusion which has not been killed — the 
class illusion. We are all very much alike ; but we 
live in water-tight compartments called classes, and 
the inhabitants of each compartment tend to believe 
that they alone are patriotic. This illusion, to be 
just, is not fostered chiefly by the press, which wants 
to sell its work to all classes ; but it has strong hold 
of the Government office. The Government does not 
know the people, except as an actor knows the 
audience ; and therefore does not trust the people. It 
is pathetic to hear officials talking timidly of the 
people — will they endure hardships and sacrifices, 
will they carry through ? Yet most of the successes 
we have won in the War have to be credited not so 
much to the skill of the management as to the amaz- 
ing high courage of the ordinary soldier and sailor. 
Even soldiers are often subject to class illusion. 
I remember listening, in the first month of the War, 
to a retired colonel, who explained, with some heat, 

2168 H 



114 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

that the territorials could never be of any use. Tliat 
illusion has gone. Then it was Kitchener's army — 
well-meaning people, no doubt, but impossible for 
a European war. Kitchener's army made good. Now 
it is the civil population, who, though they are the 
blood relatives of the soldiers, are distrusted, and 
believed to be likely to fail under a strain. Yet all 
the time, if you want to hear half-hearted, timid, 
pusillanimous talk, the place where you are most 
likely to hear it is in the public offices. Most of 
those who talk in this way would be brave enough in 
fight, but they are kept at desks, and worried with 
detailed business, and harassed by speculative dangers, 
and they lose perspective. Soon or late, we are going 
to win this War ; and it is the people who arc going 
to win it. 

If the press (or perhaps the Government, which 
controls the press) is not afraid of the people, why 
does it tell them so little about our reverses, and the 
merits of our enemies? For information concerning 
these things we have to depend wholly on conversa- 
tion with returned soldiers. For instance, the horrible 
stories that we hear of the brutal treatment of our 
prisoners are numerous, and are true, and make a 
heavy bill against Germany, which bill we mean to 
present. But are they fair examples of the average 
treatment ? We cannot tell ; the accounts published are 
almost exclusively confined to the worst happenings. 
Most of the officers with whom I have talked who had 
been in several German military prisons said that they 
had nothing serious to complain of. Prison is not a 
good place, and it is not pleasant to have your pea- 



THE WAR AND THK PRESS 115 

soup and your coffee, one after the otlier, in the .same 
tin dipper; but tliey were soldiers, and they agreed 
tliat it would be al)Hurd to make a grievance ol' things 
Hke tliat. One private soldier was an even greater 
philosopher. * No ', he said, ' I have nothing to com- 
plain of. Of course, they do spit at you a good deal.' 
That man was unconquerable. 

In shipping returns and the like we are given 
averages ; why are we told nothing at all of the 
milder experiences of our soldier prisoners ? It would 
not make us less resolved to do all that we can to 
better the lot of those who are suffering insult and 
torture, and to exact full retribution from the enemy. 
And it would bring some hope to those whose husbands 
or children or friends are in German military prisons, 
and who are racked ev(3ry day by tales of what, in 
fact, arc exceptional atrocities. 

Or take the question of the conduct of German 
officers. We know that the Prussian military Govern- 
ment, in its approved Iiandbooks, teaches its officers 
the use of brutality and terror as military weapons. 
The German philosophy of war, of which this is a 
part, is not really a philosophy of war; it is a philo- 
sophy of victory. For a long time now the Germans 
have been accustomed to victory, and have studied 
the arts of breaking the spirit and torturing the mind 
of the peoples whom they invade. Their philosophy 
of war will have to be rewritten when the time comes 
for them to accommodate their doctrin(5 to their own 
defeat. In the meantime they teach frightfulness to 
their officers, and most of their officers prove ready 
pupils. There must be some, one would think, here 

h2 



116 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

and there, if only a sprinkling, who fall short of the 
Prussian doctrine, and are betrayed by human feeling 
into what we should recognize as decent and honour- 
able conduct. And so there are ; only we do not hear 
of them through the press. I should like to tell two 
stories which come to me from personal sources. The 
first may be called the story of the Christmas truce 
and the German captain. In the lull which fell on 
the fighting at the time of the first Christmas of the 
War, a British officer was disquieted to notice that his 
men were fraternizing with the Germans, who were 
standing about with them in No-man's land, laughing 
and talking. He went out to them at once, to bring 
them back to their own trenches. When he came up 
to his men, he met a German captain who had arrived 
on the same errand. The two officers, British and 
German, fell into talk, and while they were standing 
together, in not unfriendly fashion, one of the men 
took a snapshot photograph of them, copies of which 
were afterwards circulated in the trenches. Then the 
men were recalled to their duty, on the one side and 
the other, and, after an interval of some days, the war 
began again. A little time after this the British officer 
was in charge of a patrol, and, having lost his way, 
found himself in the German trenches, where he and 
his men were surrounded and captured. As they 
were being marched off* along the trenches, they met 
the German captain, who ordered the men to be 
taken to the rear, and then, addressing the officer 
without any sign of recognition, said in a loud voice, 
' You, follow me ! ' He led him by complicated ways 
along a whole series of trenches and up a sap, 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 117 

at the end ot* which he stopped, saluted, and, 
pointing with his hand, said ' Your trenches are there. 
Good day.' 

My second story, the story of the British lieutenant 
in No-man's land, is briefer. I was with a friend of 
mine, a young officer back from the front, wounded, 
and the conduct of German officers was being dis- 
cussed. He said, 'You can't expect me to be very 
hard on German officers, for one of them saved my 
life '. He then told how he and a companion crept 
out into No-man's land to bring in some of our 
wounded who were lying there. When they had 
reached the wounded, and were preparing to bring 
them in, they were discovered by the Germans oppo- 
site, who at once whipped up a machine-gun and 
turned it on them. Their lives were not worth half 
a minute's purchase, when suddenly a German officer 
leapt up on to the parapet, and, angrily waving back 
the machine-gunners, called out, in English, ' That 's 
all right. You may take them in.' 

These are no doubt exceptional cases ; the rule is 
very different. But a good many of such cases are 
known to soldiers, and I have seen none of them in 
the press. Soldiers are silent by law, and journalists 
either do not hear these things, or, believing that hate 
is a valuable asset, suppress all mention of them. If 
England could ever be disgraced by a mishap, she 
would be disgraced by having given birth to those 
Englishmen, few and wretched, who, when an enemy 
behaves generously, conceal or deny the fact. And 
consider the effect of this silence on the Germans. 
There are some German officers, as I said, who are 



118 THE WAR AND THE PRESS 

better than the German military handbooks, and 
better than their monstrous chiefs. Which of them 
will pay the smallest attention to what our papers say 
when he finds that they collect only atrocities, and 
are blind to humanity if they see it in an enemy ? 
He will regard our press accounts of the German 
army as the work of malicious cripples ; and our per- 
fectly true narrative of the unspeakable brutality and 
filthiness of the German army's doings will lose credit 
with him. 

If I had my way, I would staff the newspaper 
offices, as far as possible, with wounded soldiers, and 
I would give some of the present staff a holiday as 
stretcher-bearers. Then we should hear more of the 
truth. 

Is it feared that we should have no heart for the 
W^ar if once we are convinced that among the 
Germans there are some human beings ? Is it believed 
that our people can be heroic on one condition only, 
that they shall be asked to fight no one but orang- 
outangs ? Our airmen fight as well as any one, in this 
world or above it, has ever fought ; and we owe them 
a great debt of thanks for maintaining, and, by their 
example, actually teaching the Germans to maintain, 
a high standard of decency. 

This War has shown, what we might have gathered 
from our history, that we fight best up hill. From 
our history also we may learn that it does not relax 
our sinews to be told that our enemy has some good 
qualities. We should like him better as an enemy if 
he had more. We know what we have believed ; and 
we are not going to fail in resolve or perseverance 



THE WAR AND THE PRESS 119 

because we find that our task is difficult, and that we 
have not a monopoly of all the virtues. 

Most of us will not live to see it, for our recovery 
from this disease will be long and troublesome, but the 
War will do great things for us. It will make a reality 
of the British Commonwealth, which until now has 
been only an aspiration and a dream. It will lay the 
sure foundation of a League of Nations in the atiec- 
tion and understanding which it has promoted among 
all English-speaking peoples, and in the relations of 
mutual respect and mutual service which it has estab- 
lished between the English-speaking peoples and the 
Latin races. Our united Rolls of Honour make the 
most magnificent list of benefactors that the world has 
ever seen. In the end, the War may perhaps even 
save the soul of the main criminal, awaken him from 
his bloody dream, and lead him back by degrees to 
the possibility of innocence and goodwill. 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

Annual Shahes'peare Lediire of the British Academy, 
delivered July 4, 1918 

There is nothing new and important to be said of 
Shakespeare. In recent years antiquaries have made 
some additions to our knowledge of the facts of his 
life. These additions are all tantalizing and compara- 
tively insignificant. The history of the publication of 
his works has also become clearer and more intelligible, 
especially by the labours of Mr. Pollard ; but the whole 
question of quartos and folios remains thorny and 
difficult, so that no one can reach any definite conclu- 
sion in this matter without a liberal use of conjecture. 

I propose to return to the old catholic doctrine 
which has been illuminated by so many disciples of 
Shakespeare, and to speak of him as our great national 
poet. He embodies and exemplifies all the virtues, 
and most of the faults, of England. Any one who 
reads and understands him understands England. 
This method of studying Shakespeare by reading him 
has perhaps gone somewhat out of vogue in favour of 
more roundabout ways of approach, but it is the best 
method for all that. Shakespeare tells us more about 
himself and his mind than we could learn even from 
those who knew him in his habit as he lived, if they 
were all alive and all talking. To learn what he tells 
we have only to listen. 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 121 

I think there is no national poet, of any great nation 
whatsoever, who is so completely representative of his 
own people as Shakespeare is representative of the 
English. There is certainly no other English poet who 
comes near to Shakespeare in embodying our character 
and our foibles. No one, in this connexion, would 
venture even to mention Spenser or Milton. Chaucer 
is English, but he lived at a time when England was 
not yet completely English, so that he is only half- 
conscious of his nation. Wordsworth is English, but 
he was a recluse. Browning is English, but he lived 
apart or abroad, and was a tourist of genius. The 
most English of all our great men of letters, next to 
Shakespeare, is certainly Dr. Johnson, but he was no 
great poet. Shakespeare, it may be suspected, is too 
poetic to be a perfect Englishman ; but his works 
refute that suspicion. He is the Englishman endowed, 
by a fortunate chance, with matchless powers of expres- 
sion. He is not silent or dull ; but he understands 
silent men, and he enters into the minds of dull men. 
Moreover, the Englishman seems duller than he is. It 
is a point of pride with him not to be witty and not 
to give voice to his feelings. The shepherd Corin, who 
was never in court, has the true philosophy. * He that 
hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain 
of good breeding or comes of a very dull kindred.' 

Shakespeare knew nothing of the British Empire. 
He was an islander, and his patriotism was centied on 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 
Which serves it in the office of a wall. 
Or as. a moat defensive to a house. 
Against the envy of less happier lands. 



122 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

When he speaks of Britons and British he always 
means the Celtic peoples of the island. Once only 
he makes a slip. There is a passage in King Lear 
(iv. vi. 249) where the followers of the King, who in 
the text of the quarto versions are correctly called 
' the British party ', appear in the folio version as •' the 
English party '. Perhaps the quartos contain Shake- 
speare's own correction of his own inadvertence ; but 
those of us, and we are many, who have been blamed 
by northern patriots for the misuse of the word English 
may claim Shakespeare as a brother in misfortune. 

Our critics, at home and abroad, accuse us of arro- 
gance. I doubt if we can prove them wrong; but 
they do not always understand the nature of English 
arrogance. It does not commonly take the form of 
self-assertion. Shakespeare's casual allusions to our 
national characteristics are almost all of a kind ; they 
are humorous and depreciatory. Here are some of 
them. Every holiday fool in England, we learn from 
Trinculo in The Tempest, would give a piece of silver 
to see a strange fish, though no one will give a doit to 
relieve a lame beggar. The English are quarrelsome, 
Master Slender testifies, at the game of bear-baiting. 
They are great drinkers, says lago, 'most potent in 
potting ; your Dane, your German, and your swag- 
bellied Hollander are nothing to your English '. They 
are epicures, says Macbeth. The}^ will eat like wolves 
and fight like devils, says the Constable of France. 
An English nobleman, according to the Lady of 
Belmont, can speak no language but his own. An 
English tailor, according to the porter of Macbeth's 
castle, w^ill steal cloth where there is hardly any cloth 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 123 

to be stolen, out of a French hose. The devil, says 
the clown in All 'a Well, has an English name ; he is 
called the Black Prince. 

Nothing has been changed in this vein of humorous 
banter since Shakespeare died. One of the best pieces 
of Shakespeare criticism ever written is contained in 
four words of the present Poet Laureate's Ode for the 
Tercentenary of Shakespeare, ' London's laughter is 
thine '. The wit of our trenches in this war, especially 
perhaps among the Cockney and South country regi- 
ments, is pure Shakespeare. Falstaff would find him- 
self at home there, and would recognize a brother in 
Old Bill. 

The best known of Shakespeare's allusions to 
England are no doubt those splendid outbursts of 
patriotism which occur in King John, and Richard II, 
and Henry V. And of these the dying speech of 
John of Gaunt, in Richard II, is the deepest in 
feeling. It is a lament upon the decay of England, 
' this dear, dear land '. Since we began to be a nation 
we have always lamented our decay. I am afraid that 
the Germans, whose self-esteem takes another form, 
were deceived by this. To the right English temper 
all bragging is a thing of evil omen. That temper is 
well expressed, where perhaps you would least expect 
to find it, in the speech of King Henry Y to the Frencli 
herald : 

To say the sooth, — 
Though 'tis no wisdom to confess so mucli 
Unto an enemy of craft and vantage, — 
My people are with sickness mucli enfeebled, 
My numbers lessened, and tliose few 1 lia\e 



124 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

Almost no better than so many French; 

Who, when they were in health, I tell thee, herald, 

I thought upon one pair of English legs 

Did march three Frenchmen. Yet, forgive me, God, 

That I do brag thus ! This your air of France 

Hath blown that vice in me ; I must repent. 

Go therefore, tell thy master here I am : 

My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk; 

My army but a weak and sickly guard; 

Yet, God before, tell him we will come on, 

Though France himself and such another neighbour 

Stand in our way. There 's for thy labour, Montjoy. 

Go bid thy master well advise himself: 

If we may pass, we will ; if we be hindered, 

We shall your tawny ground with your red blood 

Discolour; and so, Montjoy, fare you well. 

The sum of all our answer is but this : 

We would not seek a battle as we are ; 

Nor, as we are, we^say we will not shun it ; 

So tell your master. 

That speech might have been written for the war 
which we are waging to-day against a less honourable 
enemy. But, indeed, Shakespeare is full of prophec}^ 
Here is his description of the volunteers who flocked 
to the colours in the early days of the war : 

Rash inconsiderate fiery voluntaries. 
With ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens. 
Have sold their fortunes at their native homes, 
Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, 
To make a hazard of new fortunes here. 
In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits 
Than now the English bottoms have waft o'er 
Did never float upon the swelling tide. 

And here is his sermon on national unity, preached 
by the Bishop of Carlisle : 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 125 

O, if you rear this house against this house, 

It will the woefullest division prove 

That ever fell upon this cursed earth. 

Prevent it, resist it, let it not be so, 

Lest child, child's children, cry agaiuvst you 'Woe I' 

The patriotism of the women is described by the 
Bastard in King John : 

Your own ladies and pale-visag'd maids 
Like Amazons come tripping after drums: 
Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change, 
Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts 
To fierce and bloody inclination. 

Lastly, Queen Isabella's blessing, spoken over King 
Henry V and his French bride, predicts an enduring 
friendship between England and France : 

As man and wife, being two, are one in love. 
So be there 'twixt your kingdoms such a spousal. 
That never may ill office, or fell jealousy, 
Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage, 
Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms. 
To make divorce of their incorporate league ; 
That English may as French, French Englishmen, 
Receive each other ! God speak this Amen ! 

One of the delights of a literature as rich and as 
old as ours is that at every step we take backwards 
we find ourselves again. We are delivered from that 
foolish vein of thought, so dear to ignorant conceit, 
which degrades the past in order to exalt the present 
and the future. It is easy to feel ourselves superior 
to men who no longer breathe and walk, and whom 
we do not trouble to understand. Here is the real 
benefit of scholarship ; it reduces men to kinship with 
their race. Science, pressing forward, and beating 



126 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

against the bars which guard the secrets of the future, 
has no such sympathy in its gift. 

Anyhow, in Shakespeare's time, England was ah^eady 
old England ; which if she could ever cease to be, she 
might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but would not be 
England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows 
of the sixteenth century gave her was a new self- 
consciousness and a new self-confidence. They foraged 
in the past; they recognized themselves in their 
ancestors ; they found feudal England, which had 
existed for many hundreds of years, a dumb thing ; 
and when she did not know her own meaning, they 
endowed her purposes with words. They gave her 
a new delight in herself, a new sense of power and 
exhilaration, which has remained with her to this day, 
surviving all the airy philosophic theories of humanity 
which thought to supersede the old solid national 
temper. The English national temper is better fitted 
for traffic with the world than any mere doctrine can 
ever be, for it is marked by an immense tolerance. 
And this, too, Shakespeare has expressed. FalstafF is 
perhaps the most tolerant man who was ever made in 
God's image. But it is rather late in the day to intro- 
duce FalstafF to an English audience. Perhaps you 
will let me modernize a brief scene from Shakespeare, 
altering nothing essential, to illustrate how completely 
his spirit is the spirit of our troops in Flanders and 
France. 

A small British expeditionary force, bound on an 
international mission, finds itself stranded in an un- 
known country. The force is composed of men very 
various in rank and profession. Two of them, whom 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 127 

we may call a non-commissioned officer and a private, 
go exploring by themselves, and take one of the natives 
of the place prisoner. This native is an ugly low-born 
creature, of great physical strength and violent criminal 
tendencies, a liar, and ready at any time for theft, rape, 
and murder. He is a child of Nature, a lover of music, 
slavish in his devotion to power and rank, and very 
easily imposed upon by authority. His captors do not 
fear him, and, which is more, they do not dislike him. 
They found him lying out in a kind of no-man's land, 
drenched to the skin, so they determine to keep him 
as a souvenir, and to take him home with them. They 
nickname him, in friendly fashion, the monster, and 
the mooncalf, as who should say Fritz, or the Boche. 
But their first care is to give him a drink, and to 
make him swear allegiance upon the bottle. ' Where 
the devil should he learn our language ? ' says the non- 
commissioned officer, when the monster speaks. ' I will 
give him some relief, if it be but for that.' The prisoner 
then offers to kiss the foot of his captor. ' I shall laugh 
myself to death ', says the private, ' at this puppy- 
headed monster. A most scurvy monster! I could 
find in my heart to beat him, but that the poor 
monster's in drink.' When the private continues to 
rail at the monster, his officer calls him to order. 
' Trinculo, keep a good tongue in your head : if you 

prove a mutineer, the next tree The poor 

monster's my subject, and he shall not suffer 
indignity.' 

In this scene from The Tempest everything is 
English except the names. The incident has been 
repeated many times in tlie last four years. 'This 



128 SHAKESPEAEE AND ENGLAND 

is Bill,' one private said, introducing a German soldier 
to his company. ' He 's my prisoner. I wounded him, 
and I took him, and where I go he goes. Come on, 
Bill, old man.' The Germans have known many failures 
since they began the War, but one failure is more tragic 
than all the rest. They love to be impressive, to pro- 
duce a panic of apprehension and a thrill of reverence 
in their enemy; and they have completely failed to 
impress the ordinary British private. He remains 
incurably humorous, and so little moved to passion 
that his daily offices of kindness are hardly inter- 
rupted. 

Shakespeare's tolerance, which is no greater than 
the tolerance of the common English soldier, may be 
well seen in his treatment of his villains. Is a liar, 
or a thief, merely a bad man? Shakespeare does not 
much encourage you to think so. Is a murderer a bad 
man 1 He would be an undiscerning critic who should 
accept that phrase as a true and adequate description 
of Macbeth. Shakespeare does not dislike liars, thieves, 
and murderers as such, and he does not pretend to 
dislike them. He has his own dislikes. I once asked 
a friend of mine, long since dead, who refused to 
condemn almost anything, whether there were any 
vices that he could not find it in his heart to tolerate. 
He replied at once that there were two — cruelty, and 
bilking; which, if the word is not academic, I may 
paraphrase as cheating the helpless, swindling a child 
out of its pennies, or leaving a house by the back door 
in order to avoid paying your cabman his lawful fare. 
These exclusions from mercy Shakespeare would accept ; 
and I think he would add a third. His worst villains 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 129 

are all theorists, who cheat and murder by the book 
of arithmetic. They are men of principle, and are 
ready to expound their principle and to defend it in 
argument. They follow it, without remorse or mitiga- 
tion, wherever it leads them. It is lago's logic that 
makes him so terrible ; his mind is as cold as a snake 
and as hard as a surgeon's knife. The Italian Renais- 
sance did produce some such men ; the modern German 
imitation is a grosser and feebler thing, brutality trying 
to emulate the glitter and flourish of refined cruelty. 

With his wonderful quickness of intuition and his 
unsurpassed subtlety of expression Shakespeare drew 
the characters of the Englishmen that he saw around 
him. Why is it that he has given us no full-length 
portrait, carefully drawn, of a hypocrite? It can 
hardly have been for lack of models. Outside England, 
not only among our enemies, but among our friends 
and allies, it is agreed that hypocrisy is our national 
vice, our ruling passion. There must be some mean- 
ing in so widely held an opinion ; and, on our side, 
there are damaging admissions by many witnesses. 
The portrait gallery of Charles Dickens is crowded 
with hypocrites. Some of them are greasy and 
servile, like Mr. Pumblechook or Uriah Heep ; others 
rise to poetic heights of daring, like Mr. Chadband 
or Mr. Squeers. But Shakespeare's hypocrites enjoy 
themselves too much ; they are artists to the finger- 
tips. It may be said, no doubt, that Shakespeare 
lived before organized religious dissent had developed 
a new type of character among the weaker brethren. 
But the Low Church Protestant, whom Shakespeare 
certainly knew, is not very different from the evan- 

2168 I 



130 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

gelical dissenter of later days ; and he did not interest 
Shakespeare. 

My own impression is that Shakespeare had a free 
and happy childhood, and grew up without much 
check from his elders. It is the child who sees 
hypocrites. These preposterous grown-up people, 
who, if they are well-mannered, do not seem to 
enjoy their food, who are fussy about meaningless 
employments, and never give way to natural impulses, 
must surely assume this veil of decorum with intent 
to deceive. Charles Dickens was hard driven in his 
childhood, and the impressions that were then burnt 
into him governed all his seeing. The creative spirit 
in him transformed his sufferings into delight; but 
he never outgrew them ; and, when he died, the eyes 
of a child were closed upon a scene touched, it is true, 
here and there with rapturous pleasure, rich in oddity, 
and trembling with pathos, but, in the main, as bleak 
and unsatisfying as the wards of a workhouse. The 
intense emotions of his childhood made the usual 
fervours of adolescence a faint thing in the com- 
parison, and if you want to know how lovers think 
and feel you do not go to Dickens to tell you. You 
go to Shakespeare, who put his childhood behind him, 
so that he almost forgot it, and ran forward to seize 
life with both hands. He sometimes looked back on 
children, and saw them through the eyes of their 
elders. Dickens saw men and women as they appear 
to children. 

This comparison suggests a certain lack of S3^mpathy 
or lack of understanding in those who are quick to 
see hypocrisy in others. In Dickens lack of sym- 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 131 

pathy was a fair revenge ; moreover, his hypocrites 
amused him so much that he did not wish to under- 
stand them. What a loss it would have been to the 
world if he had explained them away ! But it is 
difficult, I think, to see a hypocrite in a man whose 
intimacy you have cultivated, whose mind you have 
entered into, as Shakespeare entered into the mind 
of his creatures. Hypocris}^, in its ordinary forms, 
is a superficial thing — a skin disease, not a cancer. 
It is not easy, at best, to bring the outward and 
inward relations of the soul into perfect harmony; 
a hypocrite is one who too readily consents to their 
separation. The English, for I am ready now to 
return to my point, a.re a people of a divided mind, 
slow to drive anything through on principle, very 
ready to find reason in compromise. They are 
passionate, and they are idealists, but they are also 
a practical people, and they dare not give the rein 
to a passion or an idea. They know that in this 
world an unmitigated principle simply will not work ; 
that a clean cut will never take you through the 
maze. So they restrain themselves, and listen, and 
seem patient. They are not so patient as they seem ; 
they must be hypocrites! A cruder, simpler people 
like the Germans feel indignation, not unmixed 
perhaps with envy, when they hear the quiet voice 
and see the white lips of the thoroughbred English- 
man who is angry. It is not manly or honest, they 
think, to be angry without getting red in the face. 
They certainly feel pride in their own honesty when 
they give explosive vent to heir emotions. They 
have not learned the elements of self-distrust. The 

1 2 



132 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

Englishman is seldom quite content to be himself; 
often his thoughts are troubled by something better. 
He suffers from the divided mind; and earns the 
reputation of a hypocrite. But the simpler nature 
that indulges itself and believes in itself has an even 
heavier penalty to pay. If, in the name of honesty, 
you cease to distinguish between what you are and 
what you would wish to be, between how you act 
and how you would like to act, 3'ou are in some 
danger of reeling back into the beast. It is true that 
man is an animal ; and before long you feel a glow 
of conscious virtue in proclaiming and illustrating 
that truth. You scorn the hypocrisy of pretending 
to be better than you are, and that very scorn fixes 
you in what you are. 'He that is unjust, let him 
be unjust still ; and he which is filthy, let him be 
filthy still.' That is the epitaph on German honesty. 
I have drifted away from Shakespeare, who knew 
nothing of the sea of troubles that England would 
one day take arms against, and who could not know 
that on that day she would outgo his most splendid 
praise and more than vindicate his reverence and his 
affection. But Shakespeare is still so live a mind 
that it is vain to try to expound him by selected 
texts, or to pin him to a mosaic of quotations from 
his book. Often, if you seek to know what he 
thought on questions which must have exercised 
his imagination, you can gather it only from a hint> 
dropped by accident, and quite irrelevant. What 
were his views on literature, and on the literary 
controversies which have been agitated from his day 
to our own 1 He tells us very little. He must have 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 133 

heard discussions and arguments on metre, on classical 
precedent, on the ancient and modern drama ; but he 
makes no mention of these questions. He does not 
seem to have attached any prophetic importance to 
poetry. The poets who exalt their craft are of a more 
slender build. Is it conceivable that he would have 
given his support to a literary academy, — a project 
which began to find advocates during his lifetime? 
I think not. It is true that he is full of good sense, 
and that an academy exists to promulgate good sense. 
Moreover his own free experimenty brought him 
nearer and nearer into conformity with classical 
models. Othello and Macbeth are better constructed 
plays than Hamlet. The only one of his plays which, 
whether by chance or by design, observes the so-called 
unities, of action and time and place, is one of his 
latest plays — The Tempest. But he was an English- 
man, and would have been jealous of his freedom and 
independence. When the grave-digger remarks that 
it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover his 
wits in England, because there the men are as mad 
as he, the satire has a sympathetic ring in it. 
Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad English 
altered. Nor are they likely to alter; our fears and 
our hopes are vain. We entered on the greatest of 
our wars with an army no bigger, so we are told, 
than the Bulgarian army. Since that time we have 
regimented and organized our people, not without 
success; and our soothsayers are now directing our 
attention to the danger that after the war we shall 
be kept in uniform and shall become tame creatures, 
losing our independence and our spirit of enterprise. 



134 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

There is nothing that soothsayers will not predict 
when they are gravelled for lack of matter, but this 
is the stupidest of all their efforts. The national 
character is not so flimsy a thing ; it has gone 
through good and evil fortune for hundreds of years 
without turning a hair. You can make a soldier, 
and a good soldier, of a humorist; but you cannot 
militarize him. He remains a free thinker. 

New institutions do not flourish in England. The 
town is a comparatively modern innovation ; it has 
never, so to say, caught on. Most schemes of town- 
planning are schemes for pretending that you live 
in the country. This is one of the most persistent of 
our many hypocrisies. Wherever working people in- 
habit a street of continuous red-brick cottages, the 
names that they give to their homes are one long 
catalogue of romantic lies. The houses have no 
gardens, and the only prospect that they command 
is the view of over the way. But read their names — 
The Dingle, The Elms, Pine Grove, Windermere, The 
Nook, The Nest. Even social pretence, which is said 
to be one of our weaknesses, and which may be read 
in such names as Belvoir or Apsley House, is less 
in evidence than the Englishman's passion for the 
country. He cannot bear to think that he lives in 
a town. He does not much respect the institutions 
of a town. A policeman, before he has been long 
in the force, has to face the fact that he is generally 
regarded as a comic character. The police are 
Englishmen and good fellows, and they accept a 
situation which would rouse any continental gen- 
darme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 135 

Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite 
so well. Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the 
purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their 
position unendurable and went to earth ; at any rate 
it is very difficult to catch one in his official costume. 

All this is reflected in Shakespeare. He knew the 
country, and he knew the town ; and he has not left 
it in doubt which was the cherished home of his 
imagination. He preferred the fields to the streets, 
but the Arcadia of his choice is not agricultural or 
even pastoral; it is rather a desert island, or the 
uninhabited stretches of wild and woodland country. 
Indeed, he has both described it and named it. 
' Where will the old Duke live ? ' says Oliver in 
As You Like It. ' They say he is already in the 
forest of Arden,' says Charles the wrestler, * and 
a many merry men with him ; and there they live 
like the old Robin Hood of England. They say 
many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and 
fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden 
world.' That is Shakespeare's Arcadia; and who 
that has read As You Like It will deny that it 
breathes the air of Paradise? 

It is quite plain that the freedom that Shakespeare 
valued was in fact freedom, not any of those in- 
genious mechanisms to which that name has been 
applied by political theorists. He thought long and 
profoundly on the problems of society ; and anarchy 
has no place among his political ideals. It is by all 
means to be avoided — at a cost. But what harm would 
anarchy do if it meant no more than freedom for 
all the impulses of the enlightened imagination and 



136 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

the tender heart? The ideals of his heart were not 
political ; and when he indulges himself, as he did 
in his latest plays, you must look for him in the 
wilds; whether on the road near the shepherd's 
cottage, or in the cave among the mountains of 
Wales, or on the seashore in the Bermudas. The 
laws that are imposed upon the intricate relations of 
men in society were a weariness to him ; and in this 
he is thoroughly English. The Englishman has always 
been an objector, and he has a right to object, though 
it may very well be held that he is too fond of larding 
his objection with the plea of conscience. But even 
this has a meaning in our annals ; as a mere question 
of right we are very slow to prefer the claim of the 
organized opinions of society to the claim of the 
individual conscience. We know that there is no 
good in a man who is doing what he does not will 
to do. We are not like our poets or our men of 
action to be void of inspiration. A gift is nothing 
if there is no benevolence in the giver : 

For to the noble mind 
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 

We ask for the impulse as well as the deed. Even 
when he is speaking of social obligations Shakespeare 
makes his strongest appeal not to force or command, 
but to the natural piety of the heart : 

If ever you have looked on better days, 

If ever b^en where bells have knolled to church. 

If ever sat at any good man's feast. 

If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear, 

And know what 'tis to pity and be pitied, 

Let gentleness my strong enforcement be: 

In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword. 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 137 

So speaks Orlando when the Duke has met his 
threats with fair words ; and he adds an apology : 

Pardon me, I pray you ; 
I thought that all things had been savage here, 
And therefore put I on the countenance 
Of stern commandment. 

The ultimate law between man and man, accordino- 
to Shakespeare, is the law of pity. I suppose that 
most of us have had our ears so dulled by early 
familiarity with Portia's famous speech, which we 
probably knew by heart long before we were fit to 
understand it, that the heavenly quality of it, equal 
to almost anything in the New Testament, is obscured 
and lost. There is no remedy but to read it again ; 
to remember that it was conceived in passion ; and 
to notice how the meaning is raised and perfected as 
line follows line : 

Portia. Then must the Jew be merciful. 

Shylock. On what compulsion must I? Tell me 
that. 

Portia. The quality of mercy is not strained. 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath ; it is twice bless'd ; 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes : 
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes 
The throned monarch better than his crown. 
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power. 
The attribute to awe and majest}^, 
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; 
But mercy is above this sceptred sway. 
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, 
It is an attribute to God himself. 
And earthly power doth then show likest God's 



138 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, 
Though justice be thy plea, consider this. 
That in the course of justice none of us 
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy, 
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render 
The deeds of mercy. 

That speech rises above the strife of nations; it 
belongs to humanity. But an Englishman wrote it ; 
and the author, we may be sure, if he ever met with 
the doctrine that a man who is called on to help his 
own people is in duty bound to set aside the claims 
of humanity, and to stop his ears to the call of mercy, 
knew that the doctrine is an invention of the devil, 
stupid and angry, as the devil commonly is. There 
are hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who, though 
they could not have written the speech, yet know all 
that it teaches, and act on the knowledge. It is part 
of the creed of the Navy. We can speak more con- 
fidently than we could have spoken three or four 
years ago. We know that not the extremest pressure 
of circumstance could ever bring the people of England 
to forget all the natural pieties, to permit official 
duties to annul private charities, and to join in the 
frenzied dance of hate and lust which leads to the 
mouth of the pit. 

Yet Germany, where all this seems to have happened, 
was not very long ago a country where it was easy 
to find humanity, and simplicity, and kindness. It 
was a country of quiet industry and content, the 
home of fairy stories, which Shakespeare himself 
would have loved. The Germans of our day have 
made a relipion of war and terror, and have used 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 139 

commerce as a means for the treacherous destruction 
of the independence and freedom of others. They 
were not always like that. In the fifteenth century 
they spread the art of printing through Europe, 
for the service of man, by the method of peaceful 
penetration. My friend Mr. John Sampson recently 
expressed to me a hope that our air-forces would 
not bomb Mainz, ' for Mainz ', he said, ' is a sacred 
place to the bibliographer'. According to a state- 
ment published in Cologne in 1499, 'the highly 
valuable art of printing was invented first of all in 
Germany at Mainz on the Rhine. And it is a great 
honour to the German nation that such ingenious 
men are to be found among them. . . . And in the 
year of our Lord 1450 it was a golden year, and they 
began to print, and the first book they printed was the 
Bible in Latin: it was printed in a large character, 
resembling the types with which the present mass- 
books are printed.' Gutenberg, the printer of this 
Bible, never mentions his own name, and the only 
personal note we have of his, in the colophon of the 
Gatkolicon, printed in 1460, is a hymn in praise of 
his city : * With the aid of the Most High, who 
unlooses the tongues of infants and oft-times reveals 
to babes that which is hidden from learned men, this 
admirable book, the Catholicon, was finished in the 
year of the incarnation of our Saviour MCCCCLX, 
in the foster town of Mainz, a town of the famous 
German nation, which God in his clemency, by 
granting to it this high illumination of the mind, 
has preferred before the other nations of the world.' 
There is something not quite unlike modern Germany 



140 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

in that ; and yet these older activities of the Germans 
make a strange contrast with their work to-day. It 
was in the city of Cologne that Caxton first made 
acquaintance with his craft. Everywhere the Germans 
spread printing like a new religion, adapting ifc to 
existing conditions. In Bavaria they used the skill 
of the wood-engravers, and at Augsburg, Ulm, and 
Nuremberg produced the first illustrated printed books. 
Jt was two Germans of the old school, Conrad Sweyn- 
heym and Arnold Pannartz, who carried the art to 
Italy, casting the first type in Roman characters, and 
printing editions of the classics, first in the Benedictine 
monastery of St. Scholastica at Subiaco, and later at 
Rome. They also cast the first Greek type. It was 
three Germans, Gering, Kranz, and Freyburger, who 
first printed at Paris, in 1470. It was a German who 
set up the first printing-press in Spain, in 1474. The 
Germans were once the cherishers, as now they are 
the destroyers, of the inheritance of civilization. I do 
not pretend to explain the change. Perhaps it is a 
tragedy of education. That is a dangerous moment 
in the life of a child when he begins to be uneasily 
aware that he is valued for his simplicity and innocence. 
Then he resolves to break with the past, to put away 
childish things, to forgo affection, and to earn respect 
by imitating the activities of his elders. The strange 
power of words and the virtues of abstract thought 
begin to fascinate him. He loses touch with the 
things of sense, and ceases to speak as a child. If his 
first attempts at argument and dogma win him praise 
and esteem, if he proves himself a better fighter than 
an older boy next door, who has often bullied him, and 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 141 

if at the same time he comes into money, he is on the 
road to ruin. His very simplicity is a snare to him. 
' What a fool I was ', he thinks, ' to let myself be put 
upon; I now see that I am a great philosopher and 
a splendid soldier, born to subdue others rather than 
to agree with them, and entitled to a chief share in all 
the luxuries of the world. It is for me to say what is 
good and true, and if any of these people contradict 
me I shall knock them down.' He suits his behaviour 
to his new conception of himself, and is soon hated 
by all the neighbours. Then he turns bitter. These 
people, he thinks, are all in a plot against him. They 
must be blind to goodness and beauty, or why do they 
dislike him 1 His rage reaches the point of madness ; 
he stabs and poisons the villagers, and burns down 
their houses. We are still waiting to see what will 
become of him. 

This outbreak has been long preparing. Seventy 
years before the War the German poet Freiligrath 
wrote a poem to prove that Germany is Hamlet, urged 
by the spirit of her fathers to claim her inheritance, 
vacillating and lost in thought, but destined, before 
the Fifth Act ends, to strew the stage with the corpses 
of her enemies. Only a German could have hit on the 
idea that Germany is Hamlet. The English, for whom 
the play was written, know that Hamlet is Hamlet, 
and that Shakespeare was thinking of a young man, 
not of the pomposities of national ambition. But if 
these clumsy allegories must be imposed upon great 
poets, Germany need not go abroad to seek the like- 
ness of her destiny. Germany is Faust ; she desired 
science and power and pleasure, and to get them on 
a short lease she paid the price of her soul. 



142 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

For the present, at any rate, the best thing the 
Germans can do with Shakespeare is to leave him 
alone. They have divorced themselves from their own 
great poets, to follow vulgar half-witted political 
prophets. As for Shakespeare, they have studied him 
assiduously, with the complete apparatus of criticism, 
for a hundred years, and they do not understand the 
plainest words of all his teaching. 

In England he has always been understood ; and it 
is only fair, to him and to ourselves, to add that he has 
never been regarded first and foremost as a national 
poet. His humanity is too calm and broad to suffer 
the prejudices and exclusions of international enmities. 
The sovereignty that he holds has been allowed to him 
by men of all parties. The schools of literature have, 
from the very first, united in his praise. Ben Jonson, 
who knew him and loved him, was a classical scholar, 
and disapproved of some of his romantic escapades, 
yet no one will ever outgo Ben Jonson's praise of 
Shakespeare. 

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, 
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. 
He was not of an age, but for all time ! 

The sects of religion forget their disputes and recognize 
the spirit of religion in this profane author. He cannot 
be identified with any institution. According to the 
old saying, he gave up the Church and took to religion. 
He gave up the State, and took to humanity. The 
formularies and breviaries to which political and 
religious philosophers profess their allegiance were 
nothing to him. These formularies are a convenient 
shorthand, to save the trouble of thinking. But 



SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 143 

Shakespeare always thought. Every question that 
he treats is brought out of the realm of abstraction, 
and exhibited in its relation to daily life and the 
minds and hearts of men. He could never have been 
satisfied with such a smug phrase as ' the greatest 
happiness of the greatest number '. His mind would 
have been eager for details. In what do the greatest 
number find their happiness ? How far is the happi- 
ness of one consistent with the happiness of another ? 
What difficulties and miscarriages attend the business 
of transmuting the recognized materials for happiness 
into living human joy 1 Even these questions he would 
not have been content to handle in high philosophic 
fashion ; he would have insisted on instances, and 
would have subscribed to no code that is not carefully 
built out of case-law. He knew that sanity is in the 
life of the senses; and that if there are some philo- 
sophers who are not mad it is because they live a 
double life, and have consolations and resources of 
which their books tell you nothing. It is the part of 
their life which they do not think it worth their while 
to mention that would have interested Shakespeare. 
He loves to reduce things to their elements. ' Is man 
no more than thisl' says the old king on the heath, 
as he gazes on the naked madman. ' Consider him 
well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no 
hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! 
here's three of us are sophisticated! Thou art the 
thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but 
such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, 
you lendings!' That is how Shakespeare lays the 
mind of man bare, and strips him of his pretences, to 



144 SHAKESPEARE AND ENGLAND 

try if he be indeed noble. And he finds that man, 
naked and weak, hunted by misfortune, liable to all 
the sins and all the evils that follow frailty, still has 
faith left to him, and charity. King Lear is still 
every inch a king. 

That is not a little discovery, for when his mind 
came to grips with human life Shakespeare did not 
deal in rhetoric; so that the good he finds is real 
good — ' 'tis in grain ; 'twill endure wind and weather '. 
Nothing is easier than to make a party of humanity, 
and to exalt mankind by ignorantly vilifying the rest 
of the animal creation, which is full of strange virtues 
and abilities. Shakespeare refused that way ; he saw 
man weak and wretched, not able to maintain himself 
except as a pensioner on the bounty of the world, 
curiously ignorant of his nature and his destiny, yet 
endowed with certain gifts in which he can find 
sustenance and rest, brave by instinct, so that courage 
is not so much his virtue as cowardice is his lament- 
able and exceptional fault, ready to forget his pains 
or to turn them into pleasures by the alchemy of his 
mind, quick to believe, and slow to suspect or distrust, 
generous and tender to others, in so far as his thought 
and imagination, which are the weakest things about 
him, enable him to bridge the spaces that separate 
man from man, willing to make of life a great thing 
while he has it, and a little thing when he comes to 
lose it. These are some of his gifts ; and Shakespeare 
would not have denied the saying of a thinker with 
whom he has no very strong or natural affinity, that 
* the greatest of these is charity '. 



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